Calculating angle of elevation in a ticker tape lab

[daee]

Hi, I'm currently doing a lab for gr.12 physics and it involves calculating the angle of elevation of a ramp by using information from ticker tapes.

We're given a ticker tape and from that I made a position-time graph, velocity-time graph and acceleration time graph. Now I'm unsure where to start.

If anyone can give me a few hints as to where to start that would be appreciated.

Here's a link to an excel file with the graphs you can take a look if you're not sure what I'm talking about. http://www.mediafire.com/view/?ojmtzyianwl5nqi

 

[Delphi51]

Welcome to PF, Daee!

Nice work in the spreadsheet! I would recommend using a trend line rather than connecting the dots on the velocity and acceleration graphs - tickertape data has a lot of jitter in it due to rounding the distance measurements and this will be smoothed out by trend lines. Then you can accurately find the slope on the velocity graph and the constant value of the acceleration for most of the run.

On the theory side, what could you predict about those graphs if you knew the angle of the ramp? You probably have formulas for accelerated motion that you could use to work out the acceleration depending on the angle. Knowing the acceleration from the graphs, you should be able to work the formulas backwards and solve for the angle.