Monday, November 8, 2010

Modeling the Restoring Force Present in a Spring-mass System

The experimental set-up.
In class, we used a force sensor coupled with a computer to monitor the restoring force present in a spring-mass system as it bounced up and down. The graph of force vs. time is partially shown below.





  1. What is the period of this oscillation?
  2. The mass attached to this spring was 150 grams. What is the spring constant (k) for this spring?
  3. Calculate the acceleration of the mass at t = 26.0 seconds.



Many students noticed the similarity of the actual data with the shape of the familiar sine graph (shown below).

Posted by Yale Physics at 2:37 PM

6 comments:

  1. HraldoNovember 11, 2010 at 3:50 PM

    I believe that the oscillation would be around 0.4s-0.5s.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yale PhysicsNovember 11, 2010 at 4:46 PM

    Yes, I think that's a good estimate. In retrospect, I should have used a higher-resolution screen shot so we could read the graph more easily.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Mrs. ClauseNovember 11, 2010 at 6:19 PM

    I find the graph hard to read. But this was a good question and had me stumped!

    ReplyDelete
  4. HraldoNovember 11, 2010 at 6:22 PM

    i agree completely

    ReplyDelete
  5. Brian BearssNovember 15, 2010 at 7:33 AM

    Thanks for all the comments this week!

    ReplyDelete
  6. the big bad wolfNovember 22, 2010 at 6:18 PM

    the adding of vectors wev been doing in class are pretty easy. their almost like these graphing problem Ive been doing in algebra 2.

    ReplyDelete

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