Physics Car Safety Prac

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2015 2015 Car safety prac GaganDeep Gill Car safety prac GaganDeep Gill Sac 1: Extended Practical Investigation (EPI) Sac 1: Extended Practical Investigation (EPI) Experiment Roll a toy car down a ramp into a wall with a body inside to test if safety restraints such as seatbelts and airbags save lives and how the physics concepts of velocity, momentum and force are involved. Hypothesis My hypothesis for this experiment is that during vehicular collisions the physics concepts of motion apply to seatbelts and airbags and that they do save lives. Seatbelts and airbags allow more time for the body to come to a complete stop when a vehicle is in an accident. Aim The aim of this practical investigation is to test the effectiveness of seatbelts and airbags in vehicular collisions. Throughout this investigation we will use the physics concepts of velocity, speed and momentum. We will start off the experiment by rolling a toy car, with a clay body inside with no restraints, down a 1.3 metre long ramp into a wall to test the effectiveness of seatbelts and airbags. We will then do the same thing with just seatbelts and just airbags. We will be proving that seatbelts and airbags save lives and that they increase the time taken for the body to come to a complete stop so that the body survives the collision with minimal injuries. Background Theory & Physics Ideas When Newton outlined his second law of motion, he did not describe it in the way we use it today. He talked about a property of a moving object that he called its 'motion'. He said that when a force acts on an object for some time interval, its 'motion' would change. Today, we call this quantity the momentum of the object. In fact, Newton's first law could be stated as 'in the absence of unbalanced forces, the momentum of an object will be constant'. Momentum is a property of moving bodies. A tennis
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