Comparing The Relationship Between The Height And Stopping Distance Of A Toy Car

1337 Words3 Pages

Investigating the Relationship Between the Height and Stopping Distance of a Toy Car

My Plan

I am going to investigate how the height, (from which a toy car will be dropped) has an affect on the stopping distance of the toy car.

I will use a clamp to fix a ramp on to a retort stand, from which I will release the car. The car will be released from a distance of 128cm which is in actual fact the size of the ramp. After every individual test I will decrease the height, from that which the car will be travelling on (i.e. the ramp) by 5cm. I will also do each individual test 3 times, and will record the average for each height. The maximum height I will choose will be 25cm.

Apparatus

Þ Retort Stand

Þ Clamp …show more content…

Instead I must make sure that it does not change. ----------------------------------------------------------------------

Preliminary Work

As I mentioned before, I did some research and found that, the factors of how the height will have an affect on the stopping distance of the toy car relates with the work-energy theorem, which I am going to elaborate on now.

According to the work-energy theorem, if external forces do work upon the car, the total mechanical energy of the car is not conserved; the initial amount of mechanical energy is not the same as the final amount of mechanical energy.

On the other hand, if external forces do not do work upon the car, then the total mechanical energy is conserved; that is, mechanical energy is merely transformed from the form of potential energy to the form of kinetic energy while the total amount of the two forms remains unchanged.

While the car moves along the incline, external forces do not do any work upon it. This assumes that dissipative forces such as air resistance have a negligible effect on the car's motion (a

More about Comparing The Relationship Between The Height And Stopping Distance Of A Toy Car

Open Document