MOTION: GRAVITATIONAL ACCELERATION - Lab Report Example

Motion: Gravitational acceleration Motion: gravitational acceleration The principal aim of this experiment was to determine the acceleration due to the earths gravity. A motion detector was used in the lab to study the motion of the track moving along an inclined plane plotting the velocity-time and acceleration-time graphs of the track motion. G was experimentally determined as which was lower than the theoretical.IntroductionIt is well known that every object on the earth’s surface experiences a downward force due to the earth’s gravitational field.

Due to this force of gravity, all objects above the earth’s surface will fall towards the earth’s center with a constant acceleration. In this experiment, earth’s gravitational field strength was determined by using motion detector. The motion detector was used to measure and record a series of position and time of the track moving up and down along an inclined plane and plot the velocity-time and acceleration time graphs. According to Newton’s laws of motion, an object with an initial velocity of and a constant acceleration can be described by equation [1]: Where is the constant acceleration and is the displacement of the object at any given time?

For an object under free fall, the initial velocity is always zero hence equation [1] can be modified as below to describe this motion; Where is the height above the earth’s surface and is a constant acceleration due to the earth’s gravity? The acceleration can also be determined from the change in velocity over time as in this experiment; Where is the change in velocity and is the time taken. The acceleration (g) of objects towards the earths surface is related to the acceleration (a) along the inclined plane by;where is the angle of inclination.

ConclusionThe acceleration due to force of gravity was determined by timing the positions of the track up and down an inclined plane. The value obtained from the experiment was with uncertainty of which is less than the theoretical value. The small difference can be due to the air resistance and also due to the systematic error in the apparatus used since the values obtained were consistently lower than the theoretical value.