Apparatus: For this demonstration there was a wheel and an electric motor set up to spin a rotating platform. To measure the centripetal acceleration there was a accelerometer attatched to the top ot the platform facing inward toward the center and a photogate to measure the period of each rotation to find angular velocity.
Procedure:
1. We set the power supply to 4.8, 6.2, 7.8, 8.8, 10.9, and 12.6 volts and collected data and plotted acceleration vs. time for each setting.
2. Our data unfortunately shows acceleration to not be constant but instead bounce up and down, to remedy this we simply told logger pro to calculate the average acceleration for each setting.
3. Because our goal is to compare centripetal acceleration and angular frequency we used our equations of v=w/r and a=rw^2 to calculate two new colums in logger pro.
4. Finally we plotted Centripetal Acceleration vs W^2
5. To complete or comparison we asked logger pro to give us a linear fit, which had a correlation of .9999! The most important part was to notice that when we compare the acceleration to W^2, our slope is .1371 which is very close to the actual radius of the wheel (.138m).
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