Skip to main content

Physics in Sledding

Physics in Sledding

In my backyard I have a small hill and every year when it snows my family enjoys sledding down this hill. Because it recently snowed, my sister and I decided to go sledding. While doing this, I decided that I could use LoggerPro to analyze a video of us sledding. I placed two yard sticks on the ground where my sister would sled past.


I uploaded this video to the software and was able to analyze the movement of the sled in different ways. When entering data in, I converted the 2 yards to 1.828800 meters. I then plotted the points and graphs were produced.



With the slope from the position vs. time graphs in x and y, I was able to find the velocity in the x and y directions. In the x direction the velocity is -1.855 m/s because the sled is moving down the hill to the left. In the y direction the velocity is 0.1477 m/s.

With the slope from the velocity vs. time graphs in x and y, I was able to find the acceleration in the x and y directions. In the x direction the sled decelerated by (-) 1.083 m/s/s because the sled was moving down the hill to the left. In the y direction the sled accelerated by 0.06382 m/s/s.

Comments

  1. Mr GrayJanuary 4, 2018 at 2:21 PM

    Does the fact that you're holding your phone at an angle to match that of the hill matter in your calculations??

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. AnonymousJanuary 4, 2018 at 2:46 PM

      Yes, the fact that I'm holding the phone at an angle that matches that of the hill does matter in the calculations because it seems as though my sister is not moving at an angle. It looks more like she is moving horizontally, which changes the way that much of the information is calculated. For example, a free-body diagram of the video taken where the phone is tilted would be very different from a free-body diagram of a sledder going down a hill with the angle. The axes would stay vertical and horizontal in the former diagram but it the latter they would have to be tilted to match the angle of the sledder's acceleration. This tilt to the axes would introduce sine theta and cosine theta values that would change some of the answers.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Physics of Black Holes...Or Lack Thereof

Isabella Jacavone To comprehend how the universe works, we must dwell into the most basic building blocks of existence; matter, energy, space, and time. NASA's  Physics of the Cosmos program involves cosmology, astrophysics, and fundamental physics intended to answer questions about the elusiveness of complex concepts such as black holes, neutron stars, dark energy, and gravitational waves. In this blog post, I'd like to elaborate on a subject that is very intriguing  to me; Black holes. And more specifically, what would happen if we got near one. A black hole is anything but a hole, but rather an immense amount of matter compacted into an extremely small area. A black hole is caused when, hypothetically, a star four times more massive than our sun collapses into a sphere no bigger than 600 square km. To put that in perspective, that's about the size of New York City. B lack holes were predicted by Einstein's theory of general relativity, which showed that when a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation

Physics of Sound Dampeners and Active Noise Cancellation Sound dampening foam panels in a recording studio. ANC headphones worn by pilots and/or passengers in consumer aviation aircraft.  Acoustic treatment of soundscapes has grown alongside the sound production industry. Whether through absorption panels, diffusors and cloud panels to treat a space or headphones placed directly over the ears of listeners, acoustic treatment comes in many forms. Environments are treated acoustically to absorb excess sound to prevent sound levels from crossing a threshold above which the desired goal cannot be had. Before getting into sound dampening, we must discuss sound. Sound is produced when an object vibrates (a form of oscillation) and temporarily displaces nearby air molecules causing a wave effect as the displaced molecules collide with their neighboring molecules. Sound waves are fluctuations in pressure as the initial displacement of molecules experiences collisions that in ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Physics Behind the Rail Gun

Magnets and Magnetic Fields: Magnets are well known for their ability to repel and attract other magnets and various pieces of metal, but what people seldom understand are the physics at work that cause such occurrences. Magnets are everywhere, from within TV's and cellphones, to the Earth itself, and they are all producing magnetic fields. For a particle, a magnetic field can be defined to be "a vector quantity that is directed along the zero- force axis" with a magnitude equal to the dividend of the magnetic force and the product of the particle's charge and speed, and for a bar magnet, the field is best demonstrated as arcs going from one pole to the other. With that said, magnetic fields can also be created; the basic principle of electromagnetism is that the movement of electrons through a conductor produces a magnetic field in the region around the conductor. This is the fundamental principle behind the workings of the rail gun. Unlike a bar magnet, a ...
Post a Comment
Read more