MTM Practicum Challenge
Our goal for this challenge problem was to determine the mass of the unknown object that we received, without using a scale to do so. Using this information, we set about designing an experiment to figure out this problem. Hudson and I decided to use two carts for our data collection; cart A and cart B. We put our unknown object (a gatorade bottle) on cart A. We decided to use only one motion sensor, as it would make our life easier in the long run. We kept cart A stationary, and pushed cart B away from the motion sensor to hit, and stick to, cart A. This allowed us to keep our velocities positive, which would avoid confusion when calculating our bottle's mass.
As shown in the diagram above, the velocity of cart B before the collision was .705 m/s, with cart A at rest. We knew from prior knowledge that the empty carts have a mass of .48 kg, or about .5 kg. We also determined from testing with the motion sensor that the average velocity of both of the carts after they collided was roughly .195 m/s.
We now had all of the tools to make our prediction. Below is our thought process that we took to get our prediction:
Unfortunately, upon weighing our bottle we found that it's actual mass was closer to .64 kg. This leaves us with a percent error of roughly 20%. This is probably due to the fact that we only has time to take a few data points, leaving us with not very accurate velocities in the first place. If we could repeat this experiment, I would make sure and take several more data points to make sure that our data is fully accurate. Overall, this was a great test of knowledge on the momentum transfer model.
