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Analysis Of Coulomb 's Law Defines The Force

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Introduction
Coulomb’s Law defines the Force acting upon two charged objects relative to their charge that they hold as well as the distance between them. The interaction between these two charges occur through non-contact which is prevalent over the distance between them. Vectors are most commonly used to represent the force between two charged points. Being that is a force acting upon these two charged objects the strength of the interaction between these two charges is a vector quantity (Physics Classroom, 2015). The direction of these vectors is dependent on the type of charge on these two points, like charges repel each other therefore they will have a negative force acting upon them, as they repel each other. Opposite and a…show more content…
The direction of the force is also directed along the same line which joins the to charges together. As stated before it can either be an attractive or repuslive force dependant on the charges.
This law however can only be used to calculate the force between two point charges, a point charge is defined as an object that has a constant charge and mass however the charge doesn’t contain any size or extension.
The Van De Graaff generator works by inducing a charge on top of a metal conductive surface, A rubber belt is passed through two different materials which causes a charge to be produced. There are small combs at the top of the generator which comb electrons from the belt onto the conductive ball which spread across the surface producing a net charge of the surface. The top of the Van De Graaff generator is circular which will act as point charge when the charge has evenly distributed itself across the surface.

Aim
The aim of this experiment is to determine whether or not the force of attraction between two point charges is accurately modelled by coulomb’s law and that the force of attraction between two point charges decreases at the rate of 1/r2.
Hypothesis
It is hypothesised that the force of attraction due to the charged grounding ball on the neutral Styrofoam ball will follow coulomb’s law and the force of attraction will decrease inversely
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