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Reaction Paper On Hooke's Law

Decent Essays

“Take a simple idea and take it seriously”
- Charlie Munger, Vice-Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
This quote taken from Charlie Munger, best describes the invention of the retractable pen. The mechanism behind the retraction and the extension of a pen may appear straightforward but the impact it has made in people’s lives is larger. As a student, I have to use a pen in my everyday work and without it I cannot get any of my assignments done. In the process of using it, I always wonder how a simple spring within a pen, plays a major role in the functioning of the pen. This led to my interest in finding out that the concept of Hooke’s Law is responsible for this. The force created when the end of a pen is pushed leads to the extension of the spring …show more content…

In my IA, I will be investigating the effect of different masses on a spring in order to determine its spring constant. I will also be comparing between the 2 different methods that I will be using to determine the spring constant. I have used a static method by measuring the displacement of the spring and a dynamic method by measuring the time taken for 15 oscillations by the spring due to different masses.
Hooke’s Law Hooke’s Law states that the stress applied to an object is directly proportional to the strain produced, when within the elasticity limit. The helical spring works based on this …show more content…

This shows that which is inline with the definition of simple harmonic motion.
, where is a constant.

refers to angular frequency that is defined as and equates to .
The periodic time for simple harmonic motion is . Therefore the period of a mass-spring system is given by . In order to obtain a linear graph and determine the spring constant from the gradient, the equation is squared. Hence,

The value in the above equation needs to take into account the mass of the spring as well. This mass would be taken be the effective load of the spring. However, this value does not consider the whole spring mass but instead a smaller part of it. This is because the entire spring does not vibrate with the same amplitude as the load. Hence, .

From this equation, the graph of against would be plotted. The gradient, , will be used to determine the spring constant and the y-intercept, to determine the .
Experimental Design
Determining Displacement of

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