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Ok, there is a cart on a table(very little friction) with a string attached to it. The cart and the string goes over a pulley at the edge of the table, and has a weight hanging down the side of the table. So when you let go of the cart, it will accelerate until the cart hits the floor, then go in constant velocity until it runs into the pulley.
So when you graph it's velocity vs time, you get a sloped line and a horizontal line, and we picked the max point (v at end of the acceleration) as the final velocity to use in the KE formula.
The point of the lab is to prove (ignore friction)
mgh(PE) = .5mv^2 (KE)
We had a relatively high % error some of our trials, so I was wondering, what are you suppose to use for the mass from the PE side? (just mass of the weight or both that and the cart?). Also, same question with the m from the KE side... I thought I knew what I was doing, but I started questioning my calculations when I saw some rather high % errors...
So when you graph it's velocity vs time, you get a sloped line and a horizontal line, and we picked the max point (v at end of the acceleration) as the final velocity to use in the KE formula.
The point of the lab is to prove (ignore friction)
mgh(PE) = .5mv^2 (KE)
We had a relatively high % error some of our trials, so I was wondering, what are you suppose to use for the mass from the PE side? (just mass of the weight or both that and the cart?). Also, same question with the m from the KE side... I thought I knew what I was doing, but I started questioning my calculations when I saw some rather high % errors...