Lab #8 Centripetal Acceleration vs. Angular Frequency

Purpose: This demonstration was meant for us to be able to determine the relationship between centripetal acceleration and angular speed. We accomplish this by attaching an accelerometer to a spinning wheel. Then have a photogate attached to a pole setup up so it can record the period of the rotating wheel.

The rotation was recorded 6 times at 6 different speeds. We gathered our acceleration by by taking the average of the recorded acceleration vs time graph.

Once that was recorded we needed to calculate the velocity in order to plot the acceleration vs angular speed graph. The way we calculated omega (angular speed) is by deriving the formula from v=w/r and a=rw^2. Then everything is recorded in a table on logger pro.

With this information on the table we had to plot the acceleration vs angular speed^2.

 As you can see the graph is pretty linear meaning the experiment was pretty consistent throughout the every step. Especially since the correlation says 0.9999.