The purpose for this lab is to observe the impulse during a collision and how it changes the momentum. This is going to be done by colliding a cart in an elastic collision at different with carts of different mass then an inelastic collision.
Experiment
The first part of this experiment is to observe two elastic collisions each with different mass carts. this is set on a track with one cat held down with it's spring projecting out while the other cart will be pushed towards it and bounce back, this is done twice with carts of different mass. There is a force probe that is on the cart which will collide with the spring during the collision and give us how much force occurred, as well as a motion detector on the other side of the track which will give us velocity and position versus time.
Impulse of a collision is calculated by taking the mass and multiplying it by the change in velocity before and after the collision. From the data we gathered we go to the graph and find the integral of the dip of the force graph, which is the beginning of the collision to the end of the collision. This give us the impulse of the collision, and this is done with the cart with a greater mass as well.
The next part of the experiment has the same set up, but instead of a cart at the end it is a clay wall also the cart that is going to collide with a wall has a nail on it as well. The purpose of the nail is so that it will get lodged into the clay and stop the cart from bouncing back thus creating n inelastic collision. Just like in the previous part we push the cart and collect the data on the collision.
From that data we once again take the integral of the dip to find the impulse of the inelastic collision. Once we have done all the impulses from the graphs we then calculate what the theoretical momentum should be. This is done by going the the velocity graph and finding out when the collision started and when it ended, then we multiply the mass of the cart by the the difference between the final velocity and initial velocity.
When we compare the values we got from the the graphs and put calculated values we can see that they are very close, therefore we can say that the impulse is equal to the change in momentum. The reason the the values were not exactly the same were due to error that occurred during the experiment. Some of those errors being that there is friction on the track and the collision did not hit the force probe dead center.
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