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Essay / The concept of free fall
The concept of free fall under the knowledge of pinning in order to understand the resistance of the air and therefore the speed of fall of objects. Without a good knowledge of these concepts, it would not be possible to use parachutes or go skydiving, for example. The objective of the experiment was to neglect the drag force caused by air resistance and try to calculate the acylation using Suvat's equations. Comparing the results with the actual acceleration then provides insight into how air resistance affects these bodies. Theory To understand the concept of free fall, one must first refer to Newton's second law of motion, which states and is commonly known as the formula Where F is the force (N), m is the mass (kg) and a is the acceleration (m/s²). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay In the scenario of a given object falling freely in the Earth's gravitational field, its acceleration will always be that due to gravity, equivalent to approximately 9.8 m/s². This acceleration is independent of the mass of the object since gravity will act equally on each object. If there were no other forces acting on objects, then all freely falling objects under the same conditions would fall at that moment. However, this does not happen due to an opposing force exerted by the air, known as drag. In anyone falling toward Earth, the acceleration will be downward and the drag upward. This drag force helps deaccelerate the body and is expressed by the formula where p is the density of air, A is the area of the object that is in contact with the air, Cd is the drag coefficient and v is the speed. As the body begins to decelerate, it reaches a point where equation one will equal equation two and at this point the speed will be constant. This concept is crucial because it helps us predict how fast an object will fall and what to do to reduce its landing speed. On the other hand, there are cases where the drag force is too small to ignore and in these cases we can use the SUVAT equations to determine either time, acceleration or distance of something in free fall. Given Suvat's equation, where is the total distance, u0 is the initial velocity, t is the time a is the acceleration. Using Equation 5 you can find out the acceleration, but there is also the option of plotting a graph of time squared versus distance, which would mean that the slope of the graph would be half the value of a, because in the formula we use 2s. Experimental method In order to calculate the acceleration of the two balls, we used a set of devices which, when connected together, could accurately calculate the time elapsed between the fall of the ball and its arrival on the ground. A magnetic drop box was placed at the top so that when turned on it would hold the balls (a small magnet was added to the plastic balls so it could keep them suspended). Once the timer was activated, the drop box would release the ball and when it reached the detector at the bottom, the smart timer would indicate the total time taken. This can be seen in more detail in the images below: The drop box was also configured so that its height was adjustable, and it was possible to experiment with several different heights. The total distance was calculated using a measuring tape. After collecting the time measurements for different distances for each ball, a plot of squared time versus distance was made using2.