23-Feb-2015 Deriving a power law for an inertial pedulum

Purpose: The purpose of the laboratory is to find an equation that relates mass and period and can be used to determine values of unknown masses .

inertial balance was used to measure the inertial mass by comparing objects' resistances to changes in their motion.

 

data taken from the experiment was plotted on logger pro.

 Different mass values for Mtray were used to until the linear fit gave a correlation coefficient very close to 1. The range that gave us the best lines for the graph was when the mass of the Mtray was between 280 and 300.

In the lab we were able to come up with an equation that gave a really good close approximation to our unknown masses the values that we plugged into the equation for the slope and y-intercept came from logger pro when we plugged in the smaller value and larger value for the mass of the Mtray.
The calculations show that we were able to get the calculated mass to be pretty close the actual mass of the first unknown mass was 369 grams, but when we calculated the mass we got 370.45 grams. While for the second unknown mass the mass we received was 148 grams, and the calculated mass was 144.76 grams.

there is some error that could have occurred because of many factors for example the mass of the weights placed on the inertial balance were never weighed before we just assumed they were the masses they read.