Find the terminal velocity of a cake cup.

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                        Physics Coursework.   Hollie Ranscombe.

Plan :

         The aim of this experiment is to find the terminal velocity of a cake cup.

For this experiment the apparatus I will use will be : metre ruler, stop watch and a cake cup.

I am using a metre ruler and it is more accurate than a 30cm ruler,  it  measures centimetres and millimetres. I am using a stop watch because it is clearer and easier to use than a wrist watch.(The stop watch measures to 100th of a second.)

When I do this experiment to find the terminal velocity I will drop 1 cake cup from a certain height ( which will be kept constant throughout the experiment.) When the cake cup is dropped a stop watch will start, then will be stopped when the cake cup hits the ground. I will then repeat this experiment using 2 cake cups, then three and so on. Altogether I will take 6 different weight readings, each weight reading done 3 times, so I can have a wide range of accurate results.

When doing the experiment, to make sure it is fair I will do the following things: Make sure the cake cup is dropped from the same height each time, if it wasn’t then the results would be inaccurate. When I do the experiment I will make sure the same person times the cake cup falling, this is because different people have different reactions. We will keep the same sized cake cups, as a different surface areas would lead to wrong results ( I will presume that the cake cups I use will weigh the same). When doing the experiment I will make sure there is no wind or drafts as this would effect the falling time of the cake cup, therefore giving inaccurate results.

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When doing this experiment it is important to make sure that cake cup has reached it’s terminal velocity. In order to find this out I took some preliminary results.

I did this by taking 6 cake cups ( the maximum amount of cups I will use in the experiment), and timing how long they took to reach the ground from different heights. ( In these preliminary results I changed the height so I could get several readings and plot them onto a distance time graph. From this graph I could then see when the cake cups had reached their terminal ...

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