Projectile Motion Lab

Purpose: 

The purpose of this lab is to calculate a balls initial horizontal velocity as it leaves an aluminum channel and predict where it will land on a horizontal surface as well as an inclined surface.

Procedure:

We setup an aluminum channel to guide a steel ball down the ramp and into a horizontal channel to then launch it off a table. We placed a piece of carbon paper on the floor and recorded where the ball landed . We then measured the distance the ball traveled away from the table and the height of the table. We then used kinematics to find out initial velocity the ball left the table

Here are two pictures of our setup with the carbon paper placed on the 

floor in front of the edge of the table

A short video of our experiment where we allowed the ball to land on the floor

Here we repeated the same experiment but only this time the ball was made to land on an angled surface. After the angle was recorded, we setup some kinematics equations to determine how far down the plank the steel ball would land

In the picture above, we calculated the initial horizontal velocity of our steel ball. First we symbolically solved for time and then plugged in this equation into our horizontal component equation to calculate our initial velocity. From our recorded data we measured the 

height from table to floor as 0.938 m and the Horizontal distance as 0.835 m. 

This gave us an initial horizontal velocity of 1.909 m/s

Here we measured the angle of our plank as 36 degrees. From this, we derived a formula to calculate the distance d that the ball would hit on the plank. Using our initial velocity of 1.909m/s and angle of 36 degrees, we got an answer of d =0.667 m or 0.67 m down the plank from the edge of the table. After the theoretical calculation was made, we performed 5 trials and were able to match our  distance with a recorded experimental value of d= 0.68 m.

Conclusion:

Overall, the lab was a success and we were able to match our predicted result with our experimental result. The only uncertainty we could factor in was the height from where the ball was dropped from might have been slightly different each time but we later fixed this by setting a common dropping point with a piece of tape to ensure consistent data