A. This challenge was meant to put our skills of applying the newly learned momentum formulas to the test. With carts and an object of our choice, we used a ramp, PASCO Capstone, and a formula to calculate the unknown mass of the object. We learned 2 formulas to go along with the Law of Conservation of Momentum which says that the total momentum before is equal to the total momentum after.
Formula for unstuck objects: mava+mbvb
Formula for objects stuck together: (ma+mb)vab
For our particular experiment we chose to make our two carts collide by having the one with our object, which was a bag of salt, sitting at the end of the ramp at rest, while the other cart travels down the ramp to collide with it and they finish traveling together. The picture before the collision and the picture after are shown below.
This is the cart with the salt resting at the end of the ramp before the other cart collided with it
This is what the two carts looked like after the collision traveling together down the ramp
B. To start the experiment we designated which formula we would use. Because the carts started off unstuck and ended up stuck, our formula was: mava+mbvb=(ma+mb)vab. We then weighed the cart alone to get the number we would add to the mass of the salt bag once we solved for it. We then proceeded to fill in all other unknown values by using Capstone which gave us the initial velocity of the cart without the salt bag while it was traveling down the ramp as well as the final velocity of the two carts stuck together. We knew the cart with the salt bag’s initial velocity was 0 m/s because it was at rest.
This is a chart of all the values we found
| mass of single cart | .49 kg |
| velocity of single cart moving down track | .85 m/s |
| initial velocity of cart with salt | 0 m/s |
| velocity of both carts together | .255 m/s |
| mass of cart and salt | .49+? |
C. After all of the values were found using the program, we simply plugged them into the formula. The step by step process of how we found the mass of the salt is below.
This is the initial formula with an explanation of what each variable means:
Below is the formula with the values that we found plugged in. Ma is the value we needed to solve for.
This is how we solved for the mass of the salt:
D. Overall we were pretty close to our prediction as we were within 10% error. The formula is below:
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