Mass-Pulley Activity

In this activity we looked at Newton second law of motion, which state “The rate of change of momentum is proportional to the imposed force and goes in the direction of the force.”, the law of conservation of energy, velocity vs acceleration and power. We used a robot, pulley, Lego Mindstorm motor and a ruler to determine the acceleration at different mass and power level. We used the motor and the pulley to lift weights at the same power level but different mass. The acceleration decreased every time we added more mass; however, when the mass was the same and the power level was different, the acceleration was higher every time we raised the power. Graph were used on an Excel sheet to illustrate each event. This part of the experiment explored Newton 2nd low(Force = Mass*Acceleration); therefore, we can say that the higher the power the higher the acceleration will be and the more the mass the lower the acceleration will be. Considering the gravity, if we drooped tow objects at the same time they will arrive to the ground at the same moment no matter what the mass is because they have the same acceleration, based on Newton second low.

The second part of the experiment was to explore the conservation of energy by calculating the potential energy using the Excel sheet. The formula for that is as follows Ep = mgh. After that we examine the relationship between the battery discharge and the mass and that was illustrated by the next graph. The result showed that the higher the mass the grater that battery discharge will be.

The last part was to calculate the power used (Power used = mgh/t) for all the runs. The result of this experiment can be taken from the next graph. It showed that the higher the power level the higher the power used will be.