Rubber Band Investigation

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Rubber Band Investigation

I am going to investigate the extension of a rubber band, which I will submit to increasing Newton's of force being applied in the form of 1N weights.

Plan

I will set the experiment up as follows:

The rubber band will be attached to a retort stand, I will measure the starting size of the rubber band and then I will measure it three separate times adding 1N of force each time.

I will continue this process until 10N's where I shall stop, to avoid Hooke's law coming into place.

To make it a fair test we are repeating each level of force added 3 times, swapping the weights in between each measurement.

We will take an average by adding the 3 results together and then dividing by the total amount of results. If any results which are anomalous or out of place occur I will retake these results to make a more accurate overall result.

We aim discover a steady increase in the extension of the rubber band, as increasing amounts of force are applied.

A key factor that needs to be controlled is how much the rubber band has been stretched from one set of 1-10 Newton's results to the next. Hopefully this will not be a problem because the rubber band will not reach its limit of elasticiticty until after 10 Newton's of force being applied.

Extra Information

The Law of elasticity discovered by the English scientist Robert Hooke in 1660, which states that, for relatively small deformations of an object, the displacement or size of the deformation is directly proportional to the deforming force or load. Under these conditions the object returns to its original shape and size upon removal of the load.

Elastic behavior of solids according to Hooke's law can be explained by the fact that small displacements of their constituent molecules, atoms, or ions from normal positions is also proportional to the force that causes the displacement.
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The deforming force may be applied to a solid by stretching, compressing, squeezing, bending, or twisting. So a rubber band exhibits elastic behavior according to Hooke's law because the small increase in its length when stretched by an applied force doubles each time the force is doubled.

Mathematically Hooke's law states that the applied force F equals a constant k times the displacement or change in length x, or F = kx. T

he value of k depends not only on the kind of elastic material under consideration but also on its dimensions and shape.
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