mimphysics

Introduction

Background: Prior to studying wind resistane, we learned that all objects no matter what the weight fell at the same rate according to Galileo's discovery of the rate of acceleration which is equal to 9.8 m/s^s.  However, Galileo's discovery does not account for every aspect of an object in free fall.  During this experiment, we conducted a test so as to determine to effect of mass on a coffee filter's terminal velocity that is reached as a result off the filter's wind resistance.
Observations: The coffee filters in our experiment interact with its surroundings by reaching a terminal velocity that results from the wind resistance it encounters after being in free fall for a certain amount of time.  As stated in the background, we were trying to show that wind resistance has the ability cause an object to reach a point where it can no longer accelerate through the air (terminal velocity).
Quantities: The measureable quantities in this experiment are the speed of the filters in m/s.  These quantities will be measured at different times in order to determine if and when they reach a terminal velocity.  We will then compare our measurements to determine if mass effects the terminal velocity of the coffee filters.
Hypothesis: If the mass of an object is increased, then the terminal velocity that it reaches will be greater because heavvier objects are less suceptable to wind resistance.

Methods

The independent variable in this experiement is the changing masses of the coffee filters and the dependent variable is the terminal velocity.  Therefore, we are testing the effect of mass on the coffee filters terminal velocity.  We believe this experiment to be scientifically fair because we are only changing the mass whilee keeping the height and everything else constant.  In order to conduct this experiment, we started of by taking one filter and a stack eight filters, each filter weighing .4 grams, and dropping them from the height of one meter.  Next, we took our camera that was shooting 420 frames per second and graphed the motion of the object from rest through its path of one meter in free fall.  In order to graph these points, we imported our video to logger pro where we were able to select specific points of the filter's one meter path as it was in mid-air.  We repated this is process four more time with addtional trials of four and five coffee filters, three and six coffee filters, and two and three coffee filters.
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Terminal Velocity v. Mass Graph

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Results

The meanig of the above graph tells us that as the mass is increased, the terminal velocity of the object is greater than than that of a lighter object.  When comparing our final graph to our hypothesis, it is reasonable to say that our hypothesis was correct; however, there are some questions that arose while conducting this experiment.  One is that we were using coffee filters which are more suceptable to wind resistance regardless of the changing masses. Another aspect is surface area. In order to keep this test fair, we could only change one variable, so we kept the surface area consistant throughout this experiment.  If we were to drop one coffee filter and a ball that had the exact same weight as the coffee filter, we would most likely find that the ball eith the exact same weight would hit the ground first.  Despite these questions that arise, we can still say that our hypothesis was correct because if we were to conduct this same experiment with different objects.  The new objects that we would test would have to be something that has the abillity to reach a terminal velocity.  Objects such as a car cannot reach a terminal velocity because they are less susceptable to the force of wind resistance.  We also believe that our experiment was accurate because the data points were takn from cameras shooting 420 frames per second.