Nt1310 Unit 1 Reflection Journal

#1. I believe that decreasing the diameter of the front wheels will significantly impact on the distance that the mousetrap car will travel this

So all of the CO2’s thrust could be exerted and that could keep the car moving faster. What went wrong were that one of the cars started doing 360s instead of moving forward. We could have fixed that if we had a launch off base to keep the car and CO2 strait.

everything is okay; lower the car off the jack stands. Now that you're on flat ground, check the

The track begins with a steep climp, building up potential energy in the coaster car. The rest of the

We were given groups to design and make a mousetrap powered car that will roll as far as possible. This will be measured and be put into a graph. We will make three modifications to our mousetrap car over the course of the experiment. We have a variety of different materials, including plastic, wooden wheels and a dowel, screws, mousetrap, blue tack and a piece of string. Forces were acting in a negative way and a positive way on the car. Gravity was pulling the car down to the ground. Uplift was pushing up upon the car against gravity. Drag was also known as friction, holding back the car while it was moving. Thrust was in the cars favour, pushing forward against the force drag. There were also many forms of energy being used and being wasted like heat and sound energy. Potential energy was stored in the mousetrap, propelling itself forward. Kinetic energy was also demonstrated when the car started to roll.

When the mousetrap car moves down the track, the speed of the mousetrap car decreases, therefore my hypothesis was supported. At 1 second, the mousetrap car was traveling at a speed of 3.2 m/s. At 2 seconds, the mousetrap car was traveling at a speed of 2.35 m/s. At 3 seconds, the mousetrap car was traveling at a speed of 1.53 m/s. At 4 seconds, the mousetrap car was moving at a speed of 1.2 m/s. At 5 seconds, the mousetrap car was traveling at a speed of .98m/s. “A car will eventually come to a stop if just allowed to roll as the friction between the road surface and the wheels causes friction that causes the vehicle to stop,”(Examples of Rolling Friction). The evidence supports the claim because the wheels of the mousetrap car are moving

The aim of the experiment is to examine how the acceleration of the car differs when the angle of inclination of the ramp is amplified and to record and analyse findings.

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For example, when the car had 3 weights on it and weighed 1,457.9 grams, the average acceleration was 0.4116 m/s². When the car did not have any weights on it and weighed 653.7 grams, the average acceleration was 0.8771 m/s², which is more than double the acceleration of the car had 3 weights on it. When an extra 804.2 grams of weight was added to the car, the acceleration decreased by 0.4655 m/s². The evidence provided by the experiment proves that the more mass the object has, the more the acceleration will decrease, showing the direct relation between both mass and acceleration.

Another force that was acting on the car was friction, friction was acting on the car because the piece of wood was very rough and had little ridges on it which was rubbing on the car which would cause it to slow down a little bit. The direction that the forces were going was pretty much everywhere, gravity was going down and friction was going forwards and backwards. The car did not work well with the friction because the friction would cause the car to somewhat lose control and go off the side of the ramp, the car did not work well with the gravity either because the gravity is what cause the car to fall and crack the egg. Some ways that we could minimize those forces is by making wheels for the car and making the bottom of the car smooth to reduce the amount of friction, we can't really reduce the gravity in the car but one thing that we could do for that is make the car really light but with a lot of padding for the egg. The reason I say we could make it really light is so that when gravity is acting on the car the car won't fall as fast and would somewhat glide down to the floor with a soft landing for the

In this case we need to overcome the friction force from the axles, and tires to be able to power the vehicle by mousetraps far enough. There is a coefficient of friction between the axle and the bearing where the axle sits in the bearings and does not spin together so that is where most of the friction is created. The front wheels currently are hard rubber, and the rear wheels are currently cutting disks which are a hard material and very skinny, creating a very little amount of friction. The total force of friction would need to be less than the force of the mousetraps on the axle throughout the traps angular travel. Methods that were used to reduce friction consists of using lubrication on the axles to make it easier to spin, use skinnier wheels to reduce friction from the ground, and making the vehicle lighter with a simpler design. (See APPENDIX 1 for detailed

When you start moving that's when the motor lets go then you have kinetic energy when it falls it builds up enough energy to propel the rest of the ride. Even though you don't notice or think about it gravity is the reason you stay on the track.

The issue I faced this week was that I accidently put 50 grams weights at the front of the car, which made the car go slowly (decreased the speed of the car). As a group, we solved this issue by putting the weights at the back of the car like where the motor is, so the car can go faster. (but we did not fix our problem because we did not have time, so we thought that we solve our issue next week)

This time we were going to make a three wheel car. We used three CDs as the wheels, skiers, popsicle sticks, straws, tape, and glue. We worked on it for about a week, making sure the wheels didn’t more back and forth, finding out that skiers helped fix the problem. We also figured using popsicle sticks and skiers to make a cross bar on the car would help so we could attach a balloon and straw to it. After we were finally done, making sure everything was sturdy we decided to test it out. This time, the idea didn’t work at all causing it to just blow out the air from the balloon but not move. We now didn’t have much time left and didn’t have a

     Acceleration and Speed are obviously the two defining characteristics of a fast car. Newton’s three laws of motion are an essential part in determining how fast a