group+003



Our expirement entails the prospect of discovering the conservation of momentum. We plan on rolling a golf ball off of a ramp that is placed on a table, and have it hit a ping pong ball at the edge of the table. The balls will both fly off of the edge of the table, and we will do a bomber problem to recieve the velocity of the golf ball, which will find the original momentum. After the collision, we will find the momentum by finding the momentum of both balls and adding the vectors.

Equipment: Golf Ball Ping Pong Ball Paper Carbon, Paper, Meter Stick, Table, Ruler, Video Camera, 2 Textbooks Group effort Tape

no safety precautions necessary

Mr. Eddy says this is perfect

__Procedure:__ We plan on rolling a golf ball off of a ramp that is placed on a table, and have it hit a ping pong ball at the edge of the table. The balls will both fly off of the edge of the table. In order to do this, we stacked 2 text books an top of each other. We than layed a ruler going down the side of the books. The ruler sat on the books at the 2 inch mark and the end of the ruler was an inch from the end of the table. We then put the golf ball right behind the 2 inch mark and let it roll down the groove in the ruler and off the table. We then marked where it landed and did several more trails. Next, we found its initial velocity from when it left the table by doing a bomber problem. Once that was done, we put the ping pong ball right where the ruler ended and made sure it was centered. Next, we dropped the golf ball from the same spot as before and marked where each ball landed. We did several trials of this. We the found each ball's initial velocity using bomber problems. We then found the kinetic and potential energies of before and after the collision.

__Conclusion__: Since momentum is supposed to be conserved in perfect elastic collisions, it only seemed logical that our experiment would have have very little to no error. Unfortunately, flaws in our setup and design caused a large margin of error. The main source of error was in our setup of our "contraption". As hard as we could have tried, it is near impossible to have placed the ping pong ball in the same spot for every trial, whether it was positioning it too far or too much to the left. Other possible reasons for error are the two balls themselves. The ping pong ball may have had a speet spot or a dead spot, and the golf balls dimples may have altered how it struck the second ball. When we initially solved for the momentum of just the golf ball, the answer came out to .053, our average momentum of the three trials came out to be .05. Unfortunately, when the vectors were taken into account, the numbers changed, causing for a much larger margin of error. Either the angles or calculations could have been wrong, but either way, it would have most likely stemmed from problems in the setup. Flaws like this are to be expected any time the experiment relies on the human element because of the lack of consistancy.

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Golfball Bomber Problem Experiment Trial 1

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Experiment Trial 2 Experiment Trial 3

hey....the pages that mr eddy scanned and sent me arent loading from my comp.....can i email them to one of u to try???? its seth, ill try it sethd91@comcast.net and the video is playing for me, it says its private okay now see if they work the videos work, feel free to do/move watever u feel like