Collisions Lab

Group Members: Evan, Lucas, Kaushal

Date: 3/8/23

Purpose: In this lab you will determine if momentum is conserved for different types of collisions.

271 grams silver cart

266 grams blue cart

Materials
-Track
-2 Carts(1 green cart and 1 gray cart)
-2 Motion Sensors

Procedures:

Step 1: Set up the track

Step 2: Put motion sensor at the end of the track
Step 3: Put both carts on the track one at 70 cm and one at 20 cm
Step 4: Push the cart at 20 cm into the cart at 70 cm and use a stopwatch to calculate the time it
takes to hit the cart at 20 cm and use that to find the velocity by doing 0.5(the distance) / time.
Step 5: use the motion sensor to calculate the velocity of the 2nd cart after the collision
Step 6: Repeat steps 3-5, 5 times and record all data.
Step 7: Put one cart at 90 cm and one cart at 20 cm
Step 8: connect an accelerometer to the cart at 20 cm.
Step 9: push the carts into each other and record the velocity for both carts before and after the
collision
Step 10: repeat steps 7-9, 5 times and record all data.
Step 11: switch the magnets on the cart so that they will stick together when the carts collide.
Step 12: put one cart at 70 cm and one cart at 20 cm
Step 13: push the cart at 20 cm into the cart at 70 cm and use a stopwatch to calculate the time
it takes for the first cart to hit the second cart.
Step 14: use the motion detector to calculate velocity for the second cart after the collision.
Step 15: repeat step 12-14, 5 times and record all data.

Data:

Conclusion:The momentum is mostly conserved from all types of collisions.After conducting our
trial for all collisions we got the data of 69% momentum conservation for inelastic collisions,
78% momentum conservation for perfect inelastic collisions and 71% momentum conservation
for elastic conservation,for all trials we got an average of 72% momentum conserved after each
collision.This data tell us that majority of the momentum was conserved while an average of
28% of the momentum was lost out of all the trials this loss is mainly due to friction and human
limitation of recreating the exact force over each trial.