Modified Atwood Machine Lab

Welcome back, for the Modified Atwood's Machine Lab.  If you don't know about the regular Atwood's Machine or my lab my group and I did please visit http://tylerphysicsrules.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-atwoods-machine-lab.html.  This lab is very similar, except one of the suspended sides of the string we attached to a cart at the same level as a pulley to act as extra weight without adding force to the system and without adding friction so we could find an equation for the tension of the string.  We did two labs again with this new set up, one to where we change the mass and keep the force the same, and one where we change the force while keeping the mass the same.

To do the first lab, we just added mass on top of the cart to change the mass, but did not add any to the part of the string suspended in the air and therefor added no additional forces to the system.  As the mass increases we saw an inverse relationship with acceleration which fit our equation we got from the last lab, a=Fnet/mass.  As for the second lab, to change the force we added mass to the string suspended in air while taking the same amount of mass off the cart, so the mass of the system stayed the same while the force increased.  With the data gathered from this situation, we got another equation of a = 1.565 (Fnet), staying true to our a=Fnet/mass.

After doing these labs we went on to try and find tension during our Atwood Machine labs.  Our teacher gave us the equations a=(m1g-T)/m1 and a=(T-m2g)/m2, m1 being the mass of the heavier block or in the Modified Atwood's Machine it is the mass of the the only block, while m2 is only in the original lab and is the lighter block.  Using this and the original a=Fnet/mass equation, we can find tension in order to create a more accurate force diagram for each block.  To learn more in depth about these please visit my video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGy48BedMr0 where I explain the force diagram of a Modified Atwood's Machine.  Thanks, and I'll see you next time, likely my last time for at least a couple of months where I describe the physics behind coffee filters.