Mouse Trap Car

How Newton's first, second, and third laws apply to the performance of the car

              First Law: An object in motion will stay in motion, and object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. In other words, the mouse trap car will not move unless an outside force will cause it to move (the string attached to the axis). It will keep moving unless an outside force acts upon it (Friction, or in our case, a wall)

              Second Law: A=F/M. To obtain a greater acceleration, you need to trim down the mass of the car as well as apply more force to the car, which usually means wind up the rope nice and tight.

            Third Law: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When the mouse trap wheels push backward against the ground the ground propels the car forward.


What are the two types of friction present? What Problems related to friction did you encounter and how did you solve them? How did you use friction to your advantage?
                 
                     The two types of friction is the friction created between the wheels and the floor to get it moving in the first place, which is known as static friction, and then there is kinetic friction or the resistance against a moving object. Friction took part in two key places. Firstly, the friction between the wheels and the ground provided stabilization, yet at the cost of speed. The other force of friction took place between the wheels and the axel. The more frictionless the wheels of the car were, the easier it was to spin and travel faster.
 At first, we had to overcome static friction to make our car move in the first place, we did so by adding more string and widening the axel to create more force to overcome the frictional barrier. However, we created traction between the floor and the tire by adding tape to help stabilize the car.

What factors did you take into account to decide the number of wheels? What kind of wheels did you use in each axle?

Stabilization was a key factor in choosing to have four wheels. Also, we felt that the wheels would complement the body of the car better than one wheel. Furthermore, We wanted our wheels to be generally larger in the back so we would have a greater tangential velocity or cover more ground per rotation. Therefore we chose CDS for the back. Another reason for using CDs is that they lack mass which causes a greater acceleration, Newtons Second Law. Finally, since the axel of the CD were much smaller than the outside, if the CDs had the same RPM the outside wheels would have to travel a lot faster to keep up with the axel.

Discuss the conservation of energy in how it relates to your car.

Since energy cannot be created nor destroyed, the more potential energy you have built up the farther you car will go because it has more energy. For example, you want a taut string compared to a loose string because their is more potential energy built up within the string and therefore has more force to convert into kinetic energy. Since Kinetic energy equals the change in work, the more kinetic energy you have the more work has been done.

What role did rotational inertia, rotational velocity, and tangential velocity play in your mousetrap car?
 Rotational Inertia, particularly affects your starting acceleration. Therefore to decrease your rotational inertia, you want wheels with a smaller mass and more traction.

Rotational velocity is the amount of rotations per second. Rotational velocity actually was a problem with our mousetrap since the front wheels were moving having to rotate faster to keep up with our back wheels which had a greater tangential speed. Because of this, it caused our mouse trap to taper, twist, and turn so that it did not make it to the finish line.

Tangential velocity is the distance traveled over time. It is important to have a high tangential velocity so you can go faster. To achieve a higher tangential velocity, you must have larger wheels that can travel a greater distance per rotation.

The reason you cannot calculate work is because the force is not parallel to the distance it moves. In other words, you cannot calculate the force because you cannot calculate the work. Finally you cannot calculate the kinetic/potential energy because the velocity of the mouse trap car is not constant

I have encountered many successes as well as failures when building this mouse trap car. First and foremost, I wish we kept our designs simple from the beginning instead of trying more complex and complicated designs. It would have saved us time and effort. Next, I wish we used our resources more readily at will such as the five dollars instead of trying to fix what we had. Finally, I wish we made our changes carefully and easily. We often made rash and critical changes to our car, and that put us behind schedule and ended up costing us more work. However, what I did learn victoriously was perserverance and patience, and in the end hard work did pay off.

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