Balloon Car Experiment
Physics is matter and it's motion combined with energy and forces. In our group we decided to do a physics experiment with a balloon car. We wanted to see how fast the balloon car would travel in .5m, 1.0m, and 1.5m. We used four different color balloons to see if one balloon might do better than another. We also made sure to blow up the balloons to .80 m for each color of balloon.
This is a picture of the balloon car. We made the car out of paper, a plastic water bottle, 4 spools of thread, tape, push pins, and straws. We found many different variations online and composed our car of the best ideas. We made a few changes to our car during the experiment because the tape we used to hold the wheels in place kept sticking. We replaced the tape with push pins later on once we observed the tape was a problem.
Newton's first law of motion is often stated as an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. F=M*A
In this video Briana is showing the first trial of our balloon car using a blue balloon. The balloon car stays in motion as the air in the balloon is slowly let out. The air coming out of the balloon allows the car to have motion by accelerating as the balloon car travels. If the balloon car was not acted upon it would remain at rest not moving at all. Since Briana blew up the blue balloon and attached it to the car the balloon car then began accelerating. The blue balloon had similar times which gave us hope for the trials to come.
Newton's second law of motion states, the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it and is inversely proportional to the mass of an object. A=VF-VI/T
In this video Alix is using the red balloon to power the balloon car. We had the most trouble with the red balloon. This might have occurred because mass has a certain resistance to motion called inertia. The force on the red balloon had a push/pull upon the car resulting in an interaction. Either the balloon car would accelerate or in a lot of our trials stop and rest.
Newton's third law states, when one object exerts a force on a second object the second object exerts an equal but opposite force on the first.
In this video Caitlin had the pink balloon. The pink balloon was exerting an equal force on the car making the balloon car either accelerate or remain in its tracks on the table.
Beth used the orange balloon to move the balloon car.
Conclusion: In our experiment we learned to be patient because there were many balloon car trials that didn't work as smoothly as we hoped. After all four of the balloons had their three trials we had to calculate the speed of our balloon car. Speed is the distance over a certain interval of time.
Speed=Distance/Time
Velocity is the rate of change of a distance. Velocity represents both speed and direction.V=D/T Instantaneous, average Vinitial+Vfinal/2=Vaverage and final velocity VF=2Vaverage.
Down below is our graph for distance and time of each balloon and its 3 trials.
Kinetic Energy
Blue Balloon is KE = 1/2*.021*2.46=0.0635418 joules
Pink Balloon is KE=1/2*.021*1^2=0.0105 joules
Red Balloon is KE=1/2*.021*.7^2=0.005145 joules
Orange Ballon is KE=1/2*.021*2.2^2=0.05082 joules
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