Projectile Motion Lab

Purpose: The purpose of the lab was to further use our understanding of projectile motion in order to predict the impact of a ball on an incline board.

Procedure: In order to carry out this experiment we needed a ruler to measure the distance the ball traveled, a small metallic ball as our projectile, a ramp with a ring stand so that the ball can have a certain initial velocity when launched, and carbon paper with a clear sheet of paper so that we can see where the ball has landed. First we set the ramp at an incline and the second one horizontal so that the speed of the ball can be measured. Then we did some tests to estimate how far the ball will launch and place the carbon paper accordingly. Next we measured the length of how far the ramp is and also how far the ball landed. We repeated this experiment 5 times to get the distance so we can get an initial velocity so that we could use it for the second part.

For the second part we pretty much did the same thing except we took a wooden plank and placed it at an incline. Using our data from before we predicted where the ball will land numerically and then used the experiment to see how far the ball actually landed. We used an angle measurement device to acquire the angle and assumed we knew final velocity. 

Data: The bottom diagrams show the measurements we acquired from the experiment.

Calculations; Below are the calculations made by our group. We found the initial velocity derived by using kinematics from the data from our first trial. Then we used that velocity to find the predicted distance that the ball will travel. Finally, we calculated the percent error of our values and got a 13.2% percent difference.

Summary: Overall, we used kinematics in order for us to predict the distance a ball will travel and then the distance a ball will travel on an incline. We set up ramps so we could give the ball an initial velocity and then calculate a value in order to predict where the ball will land on an incline. The value of our theoretical distance was 0.317 m and the experimental value was 0.28 +/- 0,01 m. The percent error between both values was 13.2%.
We were pretty close but some factors were present that made our data collection a little off. Sometime the ramp moved from the original spot and that might have changed the initial velocity which in turn affects the displacement. There was also human error in recording values because we can not read a ruler perfectly. We also shifted the experiment a little because we assumed we were done but had more data to acquire. The experiment was a success because we were able to closely predict the outcome with only a small window of error.