Mousetrap Car Report

Micheal and I finished 3rd to last with a time of 6.63 seconds.

9

Physics of the Mousetrap Car

• Newton's 1st law states that an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force. The outside force in our experiment was friction or shall I say the lack if friction. Without friction our car would not move forward, however once adding friction to the car it traveled 5m. Newton's 2nd law says that force equals mass over acceleration. In order for the car to accelerate, Micheal and I needed to try to decrease the actual velocity of the car.Newton's 3rd law is every action has an equal or opposite reaction. The car pushed on the ground backwards, therefore we see that the ground pushed the far forward. 

• The first type of friction was the friction between the brass rod and the disks. This was really important because our front wheels wouldn't be able to rotate if it hadn't. The second type of friction was caused by the balloon that was placed over the wheels. This allowed the car to start. We had problems getting the car to move at first but once we put the tape and balloons on the car the friction caused it to to propel forward. We wanted as much friction on the back wheels as possible because the more it pushed on the ground the more the ground pushed back on the car.

• Micheal and I   needed four wheels on the cart in order to make it balanced. Also, we decided to use cds so that the cart could move faster, because if we decided to use large wheels the cart would move slower due to the fact that the diameter is larger and the RPM would be much slower.

• The further back we put the lever arm the more potential energy the car had. This potential energy was then converted into kinetic energy which caused the car to move forward as we set the mousetrap.

• Our lever arm was short, which may have something to do with the inconsistency of our car or even the velocity of our car. 

• The role of Rotational Inertia was how fast the wheels rotated. Rotational velocity played a role of how much time it took our car to cover the five meters, or how fast the wheels turned on the axle. Tangential Velocity meant how fast our cars wheel actually moved.
• We really can't measure work because work is force by distance where my group forgot to measure the actual distance and we did not know the force. We could not measure potential or kinetic energy either, for one needs a height to have potential energy, and we didn't and two one needs a velocity to measure kinetic energy, and we did not have that either.