Free Essays, Term Papers, Research Papers at Anti Essays

Nikki Champney
Mr. DiMicco
March 3, 2008
Ball Toss Lab

Data:

Time(s) Velocity(m/s)
0.602 0.314
0.688 1.491
0.774 3.476
0.860 3.272
0.946 2.326
1.032 1.548
1.118 0.704
1.204 -0.094
1.290 -0.862
1.376 -1.628
1.462 -2.367
1.548 -3.106
1.634 -3.692
1.720 -0.828
1.806 -1.237

Graph:


Analysis:

1. a. When the ball is being tossed yet still in my hands is the part of the graph when it is increasing slowly at the beginning of the graph right before it takes the sharp turn.
b. The part of the graph when the ball is in free fall is right after the sharp curve when the graph becomes somewhat linear until the next sharp curve.
3. In the graph of the velocity vs. time I calculated the line of best fit in the free fall section of the graph. For the slope of the line it was -9. 38. This number is quite close to the value of g which is + 9.81. By the number being close it shows that the experiment did work with slight error.
4. The mean average of the acceleration graph is around -6.4 which is not very close to the g value which is -9.81. Therefore it is not very accurate.





Source of Error:

There are different problems that could potentially occur during this experiment. One large one is if the ball that was being tossed into the air was not going straight up and was not directly over the detector. If for one second the ball was not over the detector it could completely mess up the graph and velocity. Also if the did not go high enough, as ours was not, so we could not get the accurate reading over the 5 seconds because it went up and down in less than that so the only accurate part of the graph is within 2 seconds, it could have been more accurate if it was over five...