Physics Design - Leaky Bucket

Method

1. Take six identical plastic buckets of height 40 cm. Mark the 35 cm level on each bucket. Use a previously drawn stencil to mark holes to be punched in each bucket. Draw these holes at heights 30 cm, 25 cm, 20 cm, 15 cm, 10 cm and 5 cm on each bucket respectively.
2. Carve out the holes using a knife. They could also be melted out. Care must be taken to ensure that the holes are of equal area, and preferably not too large in diameter.
3. Take one bucket at a time, and place it on a stool. Use a small stool to keep the bucket at a certain height. Place the stool at one end of a large trough and fasten it down at that point using weights or tape.
4. Fasten three metre rulers from the edge of the stool to the end of the trough, exactly parallel to each other. Place a large sheet of tissue-like paper on top of the rulers, so it is easy to read where the water has fallen.
5. Block the hole, and fill the water up to the 35 cm mark. Unblock the hole, and observe where the water has fallen. Try to mark the point before the capillary action of the tissue paper carries the water further than it is squirted. Also, thee furthest point must be marked to get the distance squirted when the pressure is roughly equal to the pressure on the walls of the bucket. This would, however cause a random error to be added due to error in human judgement.
6. Dry out the trough thoroughly and repeat for each bucket. Change the sheet of tissue like paper for each repeat to ensure more accurate results.

The data collected would be in the form of a table such as this:

The depth can then be plotted against the average of the two trials of the distance squirted on a graph to obtain a trend. It should show an increasing trend, as water pressure increases as depth increases and therefore this increasing pressure applied on the same small area of the hole pushes the water through with increasing force. As the force increases, the mass of water squirted remains the same as the area of the hole is the same, but acceleration increases. Therefore the distance it is pushed increases. However it is not certain whether this will be a linear or exponential increase as we do not know how the pressure varies with the depth of a bucket.