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Hooke's Law Lab Report

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INVESTIGATION OF HOOKE’S LAW –
AIM:
To investigate Hooke’s law by estimating the spring constant of a spring.

INTRODUCTION: Hooke’s law is a law in physics named after Robert Hooke, a British physicist who lived in the 17th century and is said to have been the first to pose the idea of this law.(wikipedia,2010) Hooke’s law states that the Force with which a spring pushes back is linearly proportional to the distance from its equilibrium (wikepedia,2010) , this can be simplified by saying that the force acting on a spring/material is directly proportional to the extension(which is how long the spring/material has become/stretched since the force was applied) of the string/material (Breithaupt, 2010). This can be expressed as an equation. …show more content…

E.g. For mass of 50. mass (g) = 50 mass (g) mass (kg) =50/1000 =0.05kg
Force = m x g =0.05 x 9.81 =0.4905N (as shown on Table 1)

The Extension (from TABLE 1) was derived from subtraction of the positions with weight from the equilibrium position.
E.g.
For trial 2
Equilibrium position (E.P) = 50
New position (N.P) = 49.5
Extension = E.P – N.P = 50 – 49.5 = 0.5cm (as shown on Table 1)

TABLE 2: Shows the extension (in m) and the force (in N) for the spring.
(Extension(m) 0.005 0.017 0.026 0.033 0.057 0.081 0.105 0.131 0.155 0.183
Force(N) 0.49 0.69 0.88 0.99 1.47 1.96 2.45 2.94 3.43 3.92
Error on Force values = 2%
Error on Extension values = ±0.002

The data from TABLE 2. are plotted on the Graph below.

Graph 1

From the graph, Slope of graph =0.0511 =0.05 to 3s.f

Spring constant of graph/k = 1/0.05 = 20 k =20Nm-2

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