Lab 19 Conservation of Energy/ Angular Momentum

Lab Partner: Jonathan Goei
Lab Performed on 5/31/17

By doing this experiment we are trying to find the height that a piece of clay will travel to after being hit by a meter stick. We will be using conservation of energy and angular momentum to find this out.

In order to do this we first had to find the mass of the clay and the meterstick. The next thing we did was to find out what the moment of inertia of the meter stick was going to be. We did this by using the parallel axis theorem. this is because we were using a pivot at the 10 cm spot instead of the end or middle. After finding this out our next goal was to find the angular velocity of the meter stick before it collided with the piece of clay on the floor. Then we found the moment of inertia of the system, both the meter stick and the clay.After finding this out we found the angular velocity at the bottom once the clay was stuck to the meter stick. Finally we found the height that the clay rose to after it was stuck to the meterstick. We did this by using the concept that the rotational energy of the stick and clay would be conserved and turned into gravitational potential energy of the stick and clay.

 Unfortunately our theoretical results were not as close as we would have liked to our actual result. Our theoretical result said that our height should have been 0.328 m. However when we measured the height using logger pro we got .229 m. Our percentage of error was of 30%. The reason why i believe that our error was off y so much is because we messed up on the experiment and didn't drop it from a horizontal height. Another thing that could have affected our actual height is air resistance which is something that we didn't take into account when doing our theoretical approach to the problem.