Science 1 Investigating thedeflection of a cantilever.

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Science 1 Investigating the deflection of a                                         cantilever.

 

Plan

In my experiment, I am investigating the deflection of a cantilever. Before we start our experiment, we have to gather the necessary equipment and apparatus together in order to start and complete our experiment. We will need the following:-

  • 1m ruler (x2).
  • 2x G- clamps.
  • One piece of string.
  • Masking tape and sticky tape.
  • 2 blocks of wood.
  • And finally 1k in 100g weights (100x10).

Here is a diagram of our experiment.

The meaning of deflection is the movement of a structure or a part of a structure when it is bearing a load. 

Once we have collected all the equipment needed to carry out the experiment, we need to first put it together and set it up. We do this by taking one of the 1m rulers and clamping it onto the end of the desk with a G- clamp. We also put some wood in-between the ruler and G- clamp, the reason for this is because we don’t want the ruler and table being indented by the clamp. We found out that this could be the best thing to vary. The reasons for this is because we could choose whether to have the ruler further away from the desk and have it bend more or have it closer in to the desk and make it less bendy. Once we had done that, then we took another 1m ruler and taped it onto a retort stand. Then, finally we took one piece of ordinary string and tied it onto the 1m ruler then taped it so it would stay in one position throughout the whole experiment. The reason, we did this is so we could hang our weights onto the end of the string and take our measurements with out the string slipping or falling off.

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Before we took any measurements we had to take a few safety precautions, the reason for this is because if we add a certain amount of weight to the ruler then it could reach its elastic limit and snap, so we had to wear some safety goggles just in case shards of wood came into contact with our eyes.  Once we had all of our experiment set up and gone through some safety aspects then we were able to take some measurements and record some results. The way, we measured the pivotal force of a cantilever is by first ...

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