Procedure: First Professor Wolf set up the horizontal rotating disk and the accelerator by taping the accelerator to the edge of the rotating disk. Then he gave the whole class stop watches to record the period of the 4 rotations (which turned out to be 3 later). He gave us landmarks so that we could measure the period of the disk more accurately. He spun the disk at different speeds and we were supposed to record the period for each of them. There were 5 trials conducted.
Data/Calculations: Below is the data acquired of the different trials we conducted. They were then averaged and input into the data table to get a graph.
Below is the graph of the resulting data collected. We changed from 4 rotations to 3 rotations because some people did not get accurate results and we decided as a class that the information looked cleaner with a period of 3 rotations. We also got the radius of the spinning disk which was about 18 cm. The period was found by dividing the number rotations by 3 for each trial. We found omega (w) from the equation w = (2pi)/T (period). We then squared it in order for us to solve for the acceleration. We then used a = rw^2 to find acceleration. The slope of the graph, as a result, illustrates the radius of the spinning disk which was 18.31 cm which is really close to our value.
Summary: Overall, the lab was successful because we found that the radius is -1.7% off than what we experimented. The data was not perfect though because of human error in the fact that everyone did not contribute to the time and everyone got different times. Nevertheless, the data was really close with only a small percentage error which means that we did prove that there is a relationship between centripetal acceleration and omega (w) or angular speed.
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