the eeps Data Zoo
curator:Tim Erickson
Ramp-Angle 2

Data from Aaron Staley, Mills HS, Millbrae, CA. Sept 2002, courtesy of Art Fortgang.

Aaron and his group timed a low-friction cart sliding down a track at various angles. They timed the cart using photogates. The angle comes from the height at the start and the distance along the track, which was the same (but not written on the page I saw) for all runs.

The purpose was to figure out the acceleration of gravity.
time is in seconds -- the time it took the cart to go down the slope.
angle is the slope of the track in radians.
acc
is the acceleration of the cart in meters per second per second

Questions and tasks
In the lab writeup we got, Aaron did not report the length of the track. What was it?
How can you extrapolate Aaron's data to get the acceleration of gravity?
Do that. What do you get?
What assumptions did you make in your calculations?


angle time acc
0.00243
2.59
0.021
0.00481
1.86
0.0404
0.00730
1.29
0.084
0.00976
1.12
0.110
0.0122
0.95
0.153
0.0146
0.92
0.165
0.0171
0.82
0.205
0.0195
0.78
0.230
0.0220
0.74
0.255
0.0244
0.70
0.279
0.0268
0.66
0.317
0.0293
0.63
0.352
0.0317
0.61
0.370
0.0342
0.60
0.381
0.0366
0.58
0.411

<text form of the data>

©2002 eeps media
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Last updated 20 October 2002 February 14, 2007
supported by NSF award DMI-0216656