William Foley

96.103 Section 801

Bilal Amro
Motion in Free Fall
September 10, 2013
Jake Freeman

Purpose:
The purpose of this lab was to measure the time, displacement, velocity and acceleration
of an object in free fall motion and analyze the functional relationship between those four
variables.
C) Analysis
I) See graph Instantaneous Velocity-vs.-Time
II) The graph on the previous page, which represents instantaneous velocity vs. time, was
collected by using the free falling weight and a tape timer which made marks every 1/40th
of a second. A set of vernier calipers was then used to measure the displacement between
each mark made by the tape timer. In order to determine velocity between points, the
formula

was used. An example of this would be how the velocity

between 1/80 of a second and 2/80 of a second was found:

After all of the instantaneous velocity values were found, the points were plotted on the
graph of instantaneous velocity vs. time. A trend was seen between these points and
therefore a line of best fit was drawn in relation to these points. Since a straight line was
drawn which related instantaneous velocity and time, and this line had a positive slope, it
was concluded that this object is accelerating at a constant rate. Now, since this object
was in free fall motion, it is known that this constant acceleration is the acceleration due
to gravity or g. In order to find the slope of this line the formula

was

used. For this experiment the two data points, (2, 112.5), and (22, 350) were used to
determine the slope of the line of best fit.