6-Apr-2015 Work Kinetic Energy System

Purpose
The purpose of this lab was to see how force was related to the work of the system. This was done with two experiments, one was the force and work done on the spring and the other being the force and work done by the spring.

Experiment
The first part of the lab was set up with a cart attached to a spring which is in turn attached to a force sensor, all on a track with a motion detector at the end of the track. What we did for this part was to start to data collection on logger pro and slowly push the cart and stretch the spring, this will help us find how much work is done on the spring.

We then take the data and generate a force vs position graph, which we then take a section of and integrate it to find out how much work is done. The reason that we integrate the the line because we learned that the area under the curve will give us the work done. We also linear fit the curve to help us find the spring constant for our spring which is given as the slope.

For the second part of this lab we use the same set ups as we did in part one except that instead of pushing the cart and stretching the spring, we are going to have the spring already stretched out by the cart and have it pull the cart back. By doing this small change we can then find how much work is done by the spring.

Just like before we integrate the force graph to find the work done by the spring, but to double check that the work done we got is within reason we then compare it to a kinetic energy graph along with it for a comparison. This was done by adding a new calculated column used to calculate the kinetic energy. The reason we compare the work to the kinetic energy is because the change in kinetic energy is equal to work.

As seen above we compared the work and kinetic energy of the work done by the spring at three different position within the experiment to see if they are consistent. We can see that the kinetic energy and work are not exactly equal, which would mean that there was a source of error during this experiment. The cause of this error was concluded to be friction caused by the track slowing down the cart during the experiment and because kinetic energy relies on the velocity of the cart this is one cause for the difference between the work and kinetic energy.