Spring Lab (Hooke's Law) Fall 2015

Project #1713 on iSENSEProject.org

Here is a printable lab handout.

When naming your data set, be sure to label using your teammate names + spring/elastic description (e.g., "Joe & Sally - Triple Long Red Rubber Bands") 

Purpose: 

1. To investigate the relationship between the forces applied to a spring and the displacement of the spring.

2. To find the relationship between the work done on the spring and the spring’s displacement.

3. To compare energy techniques to force/motion techniques for solving motion problems.

Materials: 

• Spring or some other elastic material…carefully and accurately describe your spring/elastic.  BE CREATIVE!  Try finding an interesting material with elastic properties (tension or compression)
  

• Ruler

• Brass mass set

• Ring stand

• Draw diagram of your experimentaltup in the box to the right and give it a title

Procedure:

1. Hang a 50g hook from your spring/elastic.  If your “spring” is not taught yet (or not yet on the verge of “stretching”), add some more masses until it reaches this point.  Record this starting mass in “Trial 0” of the data table.  Mark the location of the bottom of the 50g hook with a piece of masking tape on the rod of the ring stand (this is your starting position to use to find your displacement). 

2. Add additional mass to stretch the “spring”.   Record the total mass and the displacement in the data table.

3. Repeat step 2, increasing the mass each time.  You should end up with seven data points.  Be sure to add enough mass to give the spring or elastic a good stretch (but don’t damage the spring/rubber band).   Make sure your data is” spread out,” not clustered.