What affects the Motion of a Trolley on a Runway?

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What affects the Motion of a Trolley on a Runway?

Variables:

  • Mass of trolley
  • Surface the trolley is running on
  • Height of the runway
  • Distance the trolley travels

The variable I have decided to change is height of the runway in relation to velocity.

Prediction:

Predicted results:

I predict that as the height increases, the velocity also increases. This is because the formula for velocity is:

v = (2gh)

(where v = velocity, g = gravity, h = height)

So if the height increases, v must also increase. Gravity on earth is always 10m/s2, therefore the formula for velocity can be simplified to:

v = (20h)

A predicted sketch graph of the results would probably be as below:

The law of conservation of energy says that potential energy (PE) at the top = kinetic energy (KE) at the bottom, therefore all the energy in potential energy at the top must be transferred into two things at the bottom, movement and heat. Any energy at the bottom which is ‘missing’ must have been transferred into heat energy, by friction. We know that if there was no friction, all the energy would be turned into velocity, and the predicted results reflect this ‘perfect’ result. However, there will be an amount of friction in the actual experiment, so the differences in results of predicted and experimental should be able to be explained by friction, and how this causes heat energy to be lost.

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Trial experiments:

For my trials I was going to do experiments with the height ranging from 10cm up to 50cm in 10cm intervals. However, I discovered that this was impractical to go above 30cm, because the clamp we used to hold the runway up could not hold the runway above 30cm. The runway is also quite heavy, so it would not really be possible for someone to hold it for that reason. Also, the height of the runway may not be constant because it would be almost impossible for someone to constantly hold the runway at a constant ...

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