Exercise 3: Analysing data

One of the goals of this lab was to quantify how much energy is lost when your ball bounces on different surfaces, and how that changes with surface material. In the last Exercise, you collected data and calculated the speed and energy the ball possessed after subsequent collisions on different surfaces. Now we want to compare the results from these two experiments graphically.

We saw in the previous exercise that without the mass of your ball, calculating the exact amount of energy the ball possesses is difficult. Yet, if we know the mass of the ball is constant, we can compare a parameter, K / m, that is proportional to energy (remember proportionality from Lab 1?). Therefore, since you used the same ball throughout your experiments, you can still compare the energy losses quantitatively.

Exercise 3.1 (3 marks)

Compare the energy of your ball as a function of bounce number by plotting K / m vs Bounce Number for both surfaces. Bounce Number 1 will refer to the information between collisions 1 and 2; the first row of data in your table from 2.2. Plot data from both surfaces on the same graph, making sure to use different shapes and/or colours to differentiate your data sets. Submit your single plot containing both data sets with the appropriate axis labels and a legend (do not connect data points). 

Before you continue!

Before continuing, be sure you have completed (3.1), which will be graded and submitted through Crowdmark.

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Physics 1A03 - Laboratory Experiments Copyright © by Physics 1A03 Team is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.