Amplitude and period relationship Essay Example

Amplitude and period relationship Essay Example Amplitude and period relationship Paper Amplitude and period relationship Paper Oscillation is a motion, which repeats itself. A simple harmonic motion is when object moves back and fourth within a stable equilibrium position. In a perfect situation, where friction plays no part the ball will continue oscillating continuously. However in real life this is not possible, instead objects face damping due to friction. Any system which carrys a harmonic motion is known as an oscillator. Simple examples are a mass on the end of a vertical spring, a pendulum, or a trolley tethered between two springs. The amplitude of an oscillation is the maximum displacement of the system from the rest position. Hypothesis: In this experiment I will be changing the position from where I will be dropping the ball into the bowl from thus the amplitude will be changing. In my view the higher the amplitude would result in longer time for the ball to return to its original point of release at the maximum amplitude. This would result in a long period of time. For the movement of the ball in the bowl is caused by the inward push exerted by the surface of the bowl. Therefore by increasing the amplitude the time period will increase. Galileo was the first person that studied about pendulums and said about the property of them that the period is not dependent of the amplitude of the swing. But later on Christiaan Huygens found that if an object is going down a curve due to gravity and if period is independent of the amplitude then it should move through a cycloid curve instead of a circular one like in a pendulum. It supported the observation of Marin Mersenne who said that the period of a pendulum changes with its amplitude and Galileos observation was only correct for small amplitudes. In case of larger amplitudes, the period will increase with amplitude. Discussion : I have recorded four observations for each of the positions I dropped the ball from. This is because I wanted to make my experiment more accurate thus I decided to time the movement of the ball for four times for different amplitudes. Now for my next table, which I will use for the graph, I have to calculate the average of the 4 results for each amplitude but before that I divided each time recorded by the number of oscillations it made to find the time made by the ball for one oscillation. Here in this graph we can see that the period hardly changed so it means that the amplitude affected the period very minutely. We can notice that as the points dont have any link in between them. If we see the first 3 readings for 5,10,15 cm amplitudes, our hypothesis seems to be right as by increasing the amplitude the time period is increasing accordingly but if we notice the next 2 readings for 20,25cm amplitude, this rule does not apply . Conclusion: I find that the period did not increase because when we increase the amplitude it obviously means the tennis ball will be dropped from a higher position so thus it will gain more speed while falling down , therefore if the amplitude increases the speed also increases causing the tennisball to take just as long to complete a cycle as in the case of smaller amplitude. I didnt considered the friction of air. The friction caused the tennis balls speed to slow down and led to a decrease in the length of the arc through which it passed. Like if we take an example in which drop a ball from an angle of about 60 degrees within a short number of cycles the tennis ball will not move beyond an angle of 20 degress because of the friction so it is not a continous movement. The air friction is caused when the object moving through the air and has to move air molecules aside. Also the surface parallel to the direction of the motion of the object generates friction because when the molecules of the air which collide with the surface and are thus pushed in a forward direction by the collision. Therefore, I can conclude that the period was independant of the amplitude because the periods in all five cases differ very little from eachother. Evaluation: I felt that this experiment was accurate up to and extent however there were many things which we could have changed in our methods of doing this experiment to make it more accurate such as when we held the mat in the form of an arc shaped it was difficult to keep it the same throughout when the tennis ball was rolling so we could change this by placing the mat between a chair and the wall which would the mat into place this would make it impossible for the mat to move and the size to change even slightly so this could have cause us to get even more accurate results. Also the speed applied when I was dropping the tennis ball couldnt be measured so we can try to be more accurate to not apply any force, so the force applied wont affect the results. In over all in my view this experiment was properly planned, as we were able to finish it in a sufficient amount of time. To make our results accurate we tried our best by recording the time period 4 times for each of the 5 different amplitudes and then taking out the average. There were also problems when I dropped the ball in the mat it basically wobbled and moved from one side to the other and didnt just follow the same path while moving so this might have caused some inaccuracy in the results. We could have improved this by not using a mat but something else like a bowl to roll the ball in where circumference would stay same during the whole experiment. Follow up experiment: Since in this experiment we looked at the link between the amplitude and period, after this we can take the initiative to look and compare between two other properties. So we can look at the influence of changing the mass on the period. We can try placing different weights in a small cylindrical tube and then rolling it. The amplitude will remain the controlled variable in this case.