Force Motion Experiment

Constant Falling Weight

This web page has some LabVIEW screens from when I did the experiment. You will obtain your own results, but I include mine here in case you might find them useful. Your results may be different.

This is the raw data when a 10 gram mass is falling and the cart is empty (250 gm).

Here is the plot when the data have been converted to position as a function of time.

Here is the velocity as a function of time, as determined by the computer from the position data.

And, here is the acceleration determined by the computer. As you can see, differentiating somewhat noisy numerical data twice produces very noisy results.

Variable Falling Weight

Here is the velocity of the 0.5 kg cart as a function of time when it is being accelerated by the falling sash chain.

J. D. Litster, September 17, 2007.