Experiment No.

1: Newton’s Second Law of Motion

PHYS101L-A18
CE-1
 
Introduction
The first experiment applies Newton’s second law of motion. It aims to know if the
acceleration and net force or mass of an object are directly proportional or inverse
proportional if the net force is changing with constant mass and if the mass is changing if
the net force is constant.

Results and Discussion

While performing the experiment, there were two setups. The first setup was about the
constant mass with changing net force. There were two trials that have the same mass of
cart which is 0.5183kg and a distance traveled 0.7m. The first trial of experiment 1, the
total hanging mass was 0.050kg with a net force of 0.4905N, the accepted value of the
acceleration was 0.8631m/s2 and experimental value of 1.8863m/s2 and has a time travel
of 0.8615s, the trial 1 has a 1.19% margin of error. The trial 2 has a total hanging mass of
0.065 kg, a net force of 0.63765N, has an accepted and experimental value of 1.0931m/s2
and 2.3612m/s2 respectively, and 0.7700s of time travel which resulted to 1.16% margin
of error.
The second part of the experiment was about the changing of mass with a constant net
force which also consists of two trials with the same hanging mass of 0.100kg and distance
traveled at 0.7m. The first trial has a cart weight of 0.5183kg, accepted and experimental
value of acceleration of 1.5850m/s2 and 3.7748m/s2 respectively, a time travel of 0.6090s
and a margin of error of 1.38%. the second trial was performed with 0.6183kg of the cart,
an accepted acceleration value of 1.3643 m/s2 and experimental value of 3.2742 m/s2, a
time travel of 0.6539s which leads to 1.40% margin of error.

Conclusion
The experiment was completed although the margin of error was supposed to be smaller as
possible. To sum it up, based on the experiment, if a greater force is applied with a lesser
mass then its acceleration increases. On the other hand, it decreases when it has a greater
mass and less net force is acting on it. This implies that the force is directly proportional
while the mass is inversely proportional to their accelerations.