Elastic collision questions- 1) For run of your elastic collision experiment, ca

Question

Elastic collision questions-

1) For run of your elastic collision experiment, calculate the percent difference between the initial energy and the final energy. Does your data indicate conservation of energy?

2) For each run of your elastic collision experiment, calculate the percent difference between the initial momentum and the final momentum. Does your data indicate conservation of momentum?

Inelastic collision questions-

3) For each run of your inelastic collision experiment, calculate the percent difference between the initial momentum and the final momentum. Does your data indicate conservation of momentum?

4) For the run of your inelastic collision experiment, calculate the percent difference between the initial energy and the final energy. Does your data indicate conservation of energy?

With my data, I’m lost because I thought that for elastic collisions, kinetic energy was supposed to be conserved, however I got a percent difference of 110.76%. I’m not sure how to interpret this data and answer these questions for the conservation of linear momentum lab.

Part I (Inelastic) Part II (Elastic) Momentum | Aver. % Diff. | Energy Aver. % Diff. | | Aver. % Diff. | | Aver. % Diff. | 29.02% 61.18% 112.71% 110.76%

Explanation / Answer

This is not a very big issue and this sort of situation is often encountered in real world experiments. Not all theoretical assumptions can be satisfied in real world experiments as there are multiple factors at work such as thermodynamic changes due to temperature and heating up of the target or incident system from collisions. Also, there is factors of friction and air resistance at play and not to mention the fact that in real world situations we don't have perfectly elastic collisions. So, this explains the indescripency in your results.

Now, about answering the questions. Give the solutions as per your data and make use of the reasons i have provided for explaining the irregularity in your results from the assumptions.

Like for example in case of Elastic collision the target system initially if assumed to be at rest it's kinetic energy shall be zero and hence the percent diff in energy after the collision should be 100% but the deviationn to 110 % can be explained by explaining this in terms of frame of reference being chosen to understand the evetns. Which means that the initial energy might not be zero.

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