Investigation into the effect of speed on braking distance.

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Investigation into the effect of speed on braking distance

“Braking distance is the distance the car travels while it is braking.”

Introduction

Speed will obviously be a very important variable when thinking about braking distance. It doesn’t take much to work out if you’re going faster it will take you longer to stop than if you were travelling slower. But how much will it affect the braking distance and is there any pattern?

        However, speed is not the only variable that needs to be taken into account when looking at braking distance and it would be too difficult to run fair, safe tests or even to do some tests at all with the resources available.  The other variables are: Thinking distance, this is virtually impossible for us to test us to test because we’d need to get a real car, someone who’s allowed to drive and somewhere to test it. Friction is another variable of braking distance but it’s difficult for us to test because we’d need lots of materials which are expensive, also the results would be fairly inaccurate. State of the tyres is another but the tyres aren’t really going to change much on a small plastic car. The state of the brakes can’t be changed either on our vehicle because it doesn’t have any. The mass of the car affects the braking distance. If the car has more mass then it will take longer to stop because a car with more kinetic energy takes longer to get rid of that energy. The formula for kinetic energy is:                        

( ½ X Mass X Speed   )  or (½ mV   ) so obviously the more mass, the longer it will take to stop. However it’s quite unwieldy to have heavier cars and lighter ones because we’d need a lot of cars. Gradient affects the braking distance of a car, which is something that I could do tests on but speed, is easier and not as unwieldy. Also I can get a lot of results from using speed as the variable which will ensure that the tests are fair. However using the braking system which I am using it means that the results can vary a lot, but I still expect there to be a strong correlation between speed and breaking distance. Simply put my prediction is:

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“The faster the car goes the longer it will take to stop.”

Prediction

I think that if the speed is greater the braking distance will be greater and vice versa. The car needs to get rid of its kinetic energy and the formula for kinetic energy is (½ X Mass X Speed    ) so it will take more time to get rid of more kinetic energy caused by more speed. If two cars of the same weight of 800KG are travelling at 30mph and 60mph respectively it will take the car travelling 60mph 4 times longer to stop ...

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