- #1
rakbarut
- 10
- 0
Spring Constant off by a factor of two!
Hey everyone, I am doing a lab in which the objective is to find the spring constant of a spring scale, however when doing my calculations, the number I got was off by a factor of two from the supposed answer calculated from Hooke's Law. Here's how I did it...
So we have a spring scale, a 100g mass, and a meter stick. I attached the spring scale to the wall so it was secure and free to be used. I added the 100g mass and measured both the spring displacement and the force. I got x=.0047 m and F=0.9 N. So by using the law of conservation of energy, and setting the maximum stretch of the spring as my zero, I found that...
mgx=1/2kx^2 since all the grav. potential energy got converted to elastic potential energy.
However, manipulating the problem yields k=2mg/x, not k=mg/x as Hooke's Law proposes...
Please any help would be much appreciated! (I under a time crunch as well!)
Hey everyone, I am doing a lab in which the objective is to find the spring constant of a spring scale, however when doing my calculations, the number I got was off by a factor of two from the supposed answer calculated from Hooke's Law. Here's how I did it...
So we have a spring scale, a 100g mass, and a meter stick. I attached the spring scale to the wall so it was secure and free to be used. I added the 100g mass and measured both the spring displacement and the force. I got x=.0047 m and F=0.9 N. So by using the law of conservation of energy, and setting the maximum stretch of the spring as my zero, I found that...
mgx=1/2kx^2 since all the grav. potential energy got converted to elastic potential energy.
However, manipulating the problem yields k=2mg/x, not k=mg/x as Hooke's Law proposes...
Please any help would be much appreciated! (I under a time crunch as well!)