Simple Pendulum Experiment
The aim of the experiment was to determine the effects of two factors (the length of a pendulum and the hanging mass of a pendulum) on the period of oscillation of the simple pendulum and to determine the value of g, the acceleration due to gravity.
Apparatus
Retort stand String Meter ruler Table Standard hex nuts (as suspended mass) Stopwatch
Labelled Diagram Illustrating setup Method
Experiment A:
The simple pendulum was assembled using a retort stand, string and steel weight (suspended mass). The suspended mass was attached to the string and the string led through the clamp that was on the retort stand and it was then tied to the stand. The length (l) of the string was measured from the point of suspension …show more content…
A measurement for time was taken from the moment the pendulum completed one oscillation and in total, 15 oscillations were measured. This process was repeated three times. On the suspended mass of the pendulum a standard hex nut was added every time to increase the mass after each experiment. The experiment was then repeated five times. …show more content…
We got a straight line that has a positive gradient on our graph and this basically shows that the length (l) is directly proportional to the square of the time period, whereas for graph 2 we simply got a straight line showing us that our graph has little and close to no gradient at all and this shows us that there is no relationship between the mass and the period.
From the graph the value of g, the acceleration due to gravity was equal to 10.22 m.s-2. The actual theoretical value for the gravitational acceleration is 9.81 m.s-2 and the value 10.22 m.s-2 which we received was close in measurement to it.
Some errors have affected the outcome of the experiment. We used an electronic stopwatch to record the time for the pendulum’s oscillations and it seems that human reaction error could have possibly added/contributed to the deflection of our readings as time keeping usually consists in personally stopping the timer whenever the period appeared to be completed. This applies for both the values received for time for Graph 1 and Graph 2. It is possible that measurement errors could have also been encountered while we were determining the length of the string as we were uncertain in the beginning of the experiment in terms of at what points the measuring should start and end at. A lot of the values for the mass,