Air Resistance

Purpose:
To develop a model for the relationship between air resistance force and terminal velocity.

Equipment Used:

Meter stick and coffee filters to be dropped

The equipment used was a 1 meter stick, 15 coffee filters, a scale, a high location to drop all of the filters and a laptop that can capture video and has logger pro.

Scale to weigh coffee filters

Data Collected:
The mass of the filters was measured, a single filter weighed .00914g.

The filters were dropped at the top of the second level and recorded as they fell. First one coffee filter was dropped then two filters were dropped stacked together and more filters were dropped until five filters were dropped together. The meter stick was used as a scale for the terminal velocity of the coffee filters. The camera of the laptop has a set frames per seconds and the velocity of the filter(s) at any moment could be determined by finding the position of the filter(s) after each frame.

Calculations:
The relationship between terminal velocity and the force of air resistance at the terminal velocity is a power law F=kvⁿ. Finding the value of n is done through plotting the terminal velocity versus the mass of the coffee filter times the constant for gravity.

According to the graph, the k value is .0052 and the power of the function, or n, is equal to 1.7751.

Conclusion:
The relationship created found during the experiment was a good model because the R²= .951 of the power trendline. All of the collected values and results weren't input into the graph to make the relationship between terminal velocity and the force of air resistance. The value of the terminal velocity for the four filters was excluded since the data point was creating a less accurate graph.

Sincerely,

Swaggy C