Objective -Measure the acceleration of a freely falling body (g) using a Picket Fence and a Photogate. Hypothesis -Acceleration would be constant and the graph would be straight line and going up, because the acceleration of free fall is gravity. Materials: -Power Macintosh or Windows PC -LabQuest interface -Logger Lite -Vernier Photogate -Picket Fence -Clamp and stand to secure Photogate
Procedure: 1. Fasten the Photogate rigidly to a ring stand so the arms extend horizontally, as shown in Figure 1. The entire length of the Picket Fence must be ale to fall freely through the Photogate. To avoid damaging the Picket Fence, make sure it has a soft surface (such as a carpet) to land on. 2. Connect the Photogate to the DIG/SONIC 1 input of the LabQuest or the DG 1 input on the UL.I. 3. Observe the reading on hte screen of the LabQuest interface. Block the Photogate with your hand; note that the Photogate ia shown as blocked. Remove your hand and the display should change to unblock. 4. Open the file in the Experiment 5 folder of Physics with Computers. Two graphs will appear on the screen. The top graph displays distance vs. Time, and the lower graph velocity vs. Time 5. Click 'collect' to prepare the Photogate. Hold the top of the Picket Fence and drop it through the Photogate, releasing it from your grasp completely before it enters the Photogate. Be careful when releasing the Picket Fence. It must not touch the sides of the Photogate as it falls and it needs to remain vertical. Click 'stop' to end data collection. 6. Exermine your graphs. The slope of a velocity vs. Time graph is a measure of acceleration. If the velocity graph is approximately a straight line of constant slope, the acceleration is constant. If the acceleration of your Picket Fence appears constant, fit a straight line to your data. To do this, select the straight part of your data and use the linear fit function in the analyze menue of Logger Lite. Record the slope in the data table. 7. To establish the reliability of your slope measurement, repeat Step 5 and 6 five more times. Do not use drops in which the Picket Fence hits or misses the Photogate. Record the slope values in hte data table. Results
Minimum Maximum Average Acceleration (m/s2) 9.54 9.90 9.71
2. If it takes more time it could has a long distance and depend on time.
3. If speed increases more so it spends less time. It related to the shape of the distance if distance is the same, but more speed it will spend less time.
4.
Acceleration due it gravity. g 9.71+ - (0.01) m/s2
6.Yes it does.
7.Yes, because gravity always the same.
Conclusion: Yes , my result follow my prediction based on the hypothesis , because the result is same to my hypothesis so my result close to accepted. Even if the result has deviation, but it not to much it still on the accepted value. In this experiment could have the errors for example if the person who controls the computer that uses the experiment it could not it time to the person that drop the item. I could improve my experiment by concentrate to every step in the experiment and take a lot of practice.