Sparker Free Fall Lab

Purpose: In this lab, we will show the motion of a free falling mass to determine the value for gravity. The device shown in the picture below will cause a spark to mark a piece of paper at an interval  of 1/60th of a second until it travels a distance of approximately 1.5m. One we have our data, we will be able to plot a position vs time graph and be able to calculate the acceleration of the mass.

In the image below, we have our paper strip line up with our meter stick in order to gather our data. Here we can observe that the small marks on the paper are getting further and further apart as we go down the strip, indicating the mass was accelerating.

Below is our data that we input into excel to calculate or mid-interval times and speeds. When plotted , the slope of the line will be our experimental acceleration. Note that the mid-interval speeds are in cm/s and not in m/s.

Here is the plotted data and our slope reveals and acceleration value of roughly 9.7 m/s/s. This shows that our experimental value for gravity was 1% off of the accepted value of 9.8 m/s/s.

Conclusion: Our experiment showed that the value of g was very close to the accepted value of g and was only 1% off. By using our data and plotting it with a trend line in excel, we were able to show the acceleration of the falling mass. We could have also found this by plotting our position and time graph and finding an equation for this time. From there we could have derived a formula for position and then calculated a formula for velocity.