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Snow Day Blog #2

For the Snow Day blog, I decided to bring out the old Nerf guns to calculate the momentum caused by the bullet on an object.  The link below brings you to the video clip of an inelastic collision between a bullet from the Nerf Mega Centurion and a paper bag.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8TxV_jfPW7lWlV5NWxmamFrNzJRTnh1bTdiT3ktZ1ZKaURN/view
(Unfortunately I could not upload the video so I instead made a link that can be used to access it)

The mass of the bullet is 0.0025kg and had an initial velocity of 8.47 m/s.  The paper bag had a mass of 0.068kg and an initial velocity of 0.  The velocity of the bullet was found by using the Logger Pro Program with a Distance vs. Time graph.  Using all of the given information that I had achieved, I used the formula for inelastic collisions to calculate final velocity of the two masses combined.

Equation Formula:
m1v1+m2v2=(m1+m2)vf

Plugged in Values:
(.0025)(8.47)+(.068)(0)=(.0705)vf
.0212/.0705=vf
vf=0.301m/s

The final velocity of the mass was 0.301m/s.

Next, I needed to calculate the amount of Kinetic Energy lost in the collision.
.5m1(v1)^2+.5m2(v2)^2=(m1+m2)vf^2
.5(.0025)(8.47)^2 = .0705(.301)^2
.0897=/=.00639
.0833J of Kinetic Energy was lost during the collision.

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