Science Homework Help

Run the simulation and get the data!!! (Links to an external site.)

Video: Moment of Inertia Lab Lecture (Links to an external site.)

For the “in-person” lab, for each configuration (apparatus, apparatus-disk, apparatus-disk-ring) you would first determine a mass attached to the end of a pulley that would fall to floor in roughly 10 seconds. Then you would use logger pro, and a 10 hole ring with a light sensor attached to the equipment to determine the maximum rotational rate. Once the mass hits the floor, it no longer pulls the string – so the speed would decrease shortly after the mass hits the floor. Knowing the initial potential energy and final kinetic energy, you can determine the moment of inertia (rotational inertia) of the rotating items. These results then can be used to determine the moment of inertia of the individual items. Using definitions for moment of inertia, you can compare the experimental results to the theoretical values and note the strong similarities. In the real lab, this is probably the most dead-on lab we run!

This lab took about 4 days of work – strangely a ton of debugging – pulleys rotating the wrong way, increasing the distance didn’t take longer times. I almost lost my mind chasing down these issues.