Report on air resistance of projectile motion

[Joemus]

Homework Statement

All right, I'm doing a report for school that is due this friday and so far i have built a trebuchet, which is nearly irrelevant as I am prepared to invent results to match my report.

Basically what I want to do is have an idea on where to go/what to do for my report, I had ideas about discovering a variable for air resistance for that given object that has been fired in those conditions, or something to do with air resistance and its affect on the actual result of a fired projectile compared to results attained by normal projectile motion equations;
S_x=u_xt etc etc.

Any suggestions / general discussion would be greatly appreciated

Edit: Just for some background info, I'm in grade/year 12 physics in Australia

 

[ehild]

Look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajectory_of_a_projectile

You need not worry about the derivations, just find the end results for velocity and displacement. You also find numerical examples and figures. ehild

 

[Onamor]

i have built a trebuchet

Amazing! How big?!? Turn it on the school...

Is there any more guidance on what you have to do for your report? Do you just need to do any experiment?

Sounds like you're interested in air resistance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stokes%27_law" ) - you could try and show that the drag force is proportional to the object's speed?

How would you attain a theoretical value - to compare to experiment? You would have to have a measurement (or estimate) of the speed at launch, or the energy in the system.