Ode And Jthan

High-G Experiment

Our Experiment
We tested a ping pong ball for our high-g experiment. Ping pong balls seem to dent and crack very easily when playing, so we wanted to see if we could created enough g's to crack or dent the ball.

Hypothesis
Our hypothesis is that ping pong ball will dent when put into the high-g environment.

Procedure
1. Find a ping-pong ball
2. Place the ball (with tape) inside the box
3. Securely mount a camera to record the effects of the high-g's on the ping pong ball
4. Start recording and spinning the box while slowly increasing the revolutions per second
5. Observe the effects during and after the experiment
6. Record all observations made during the experiment, including the observations of the recording.

Sketch
sketch
Observations and Results
During the experiment is was very difficult to see any effects on the ping pong ball because of the high rate of speed that the box was traveling. After watching the video of the experiment it was still very difficult to see and drastic changes in the ping pong ball, even when it reached a speed of 4 rps. However, when the ping pong ball was removed from the box, a crack had started forming along the center of the ball.

Calculations
Angular Velocity: Rev/sec*2pie = 25.1327 rad/s
Centripetal Acceleration: Radius * Angular Velocity^2 = 75.798 rad/s^2
Linear Velocity: radius * angular Velocity = 3.0159 m/s
G's: Centripetal Acceleratioin / 9.8 =7.7344
Force: m*r*W^2 = 93.3835N
Analysis
Our hypothesis was incorrect. It would not make sense for the ball to simply dent in one spot because the entire ball was experiencing a high-g force. When a ball dents while playing ping pong it is because a large force is applied to one section of the ball. However, the ball beginning to crack does make sense. If we had left the ball in the box for long enough at high enough g's then the crack would have gotten continually bigger and the ping pong ball probably would have eventually split. Since the force is applied to the entire ball, the cracking makes much more sense than a dent.

Video

Conclusion
During the exiperment we learned that it would take a large number of g's to actually crack the ping pong ball. We also learned that in order to crush an object their has to be a large number of g's acting on the object. For example even the silly putty hardly was flatened by the g's it was pulling.

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