The Relationship Involving Acceleration, Total Force, and Mass

Today we conducted a lab in our physics class. We explored the question of how the acceleration of a cart depends on the resultant force acting on the cart and the mass of the cart and how this relationship can be expressed in a single equation.

We split this lab up into two different "sections". First by comparing Acceleration and Total force, we had to make mass remain constant. Therefore, the total experiment always contained 3 units of force.

The second by comparing acceleration and mass, force remained constant. For force to remain constant, there was always 1 unit of force acting on the cart.

With Charlie and Nicholas in this group, we were able to conjure up the following results:

F (unit) a (m/s^2)
1 0.259
2 1.07
3 2.92

mass (unit) a (m/s^2)
0 0.624
1 2.01
2 0.259

We are still unable to completely explain the data. But one thing is for sure, there is always the inevitable experimental error in every lab.

Till nextime!