Final Mousetrap Car Report

The mousetrap car like physics is a very frustrating. This annoying contraption somehow outlined almost everything we've learned so far in physics. This car used all of Newton's three laws. It used newton's 1st law in that and object in motion tends to stay in motion and an object at rest tends to stay at rest. This law applied to actually getting the car to move and to do this you needed a certain amount of friction to actually develop a movement and not too much friction because this would stop the car. To create friction we put tape on our wheels but only the back wheels cause too much friction would render the car's movement. Newton's 2nd law acceleration = force over mass or A=f/m. This meant that in order to accelerate more we needed to get a good force over a small mass. The smaller the mass the larger the easier it is to accelerate. In order to to this we tried to use light efficient materials. And lastly Newton's 3rd law, every action in an action reaction pair has an equal and opposite reaction. The wheel's push the ground back and the ground pushes the wheels forward. Avoiding centripetal force which did become a problem for Lincoln and I. The wheels were the biggest struggle for Lincoln and I that is because the wheels deal with the delicate balance of friction. We tried a variety of tapes to create friction but they were all too much, so too much friction was definitely a great disadvantage. We first started off with wood wheels that created to much friction so we switched to CDs, theses CDs created just enough friction to move and the right amount to keep moving. We had a pretty large force on our car so we used larger CDs in order to cover a good distance. This is because CDs are large and the diameter (lever arm) of the wheels increases the torque. However big wheels are harder to get spinning so we needed a lever arm to create enough force to spin the wheels and keep them going. When it comes to energy, the mouse trap car our potential energy came when we winded back the mouse trap and axel, but when we let the mouse trap do its work the energy becomes kinetic. Winding the axel more created more potential energy that would become more kinetic energy, this was very important to the function of our car. Because we tied rope to the axels we wanted to have more rotational velocity to compensate with our wheels. I knew that we needed to create a lot of rotational force to get these wheels moving to do this we created a lever arm as an attempt to increase the tangential velocity. This helped get our big wheels moving in order to increase the distance. Because the spring is going up and down and the car is going forward, these two forces are perpendicular therefore work can't be calculated. We can't calculate the potential energy in the spring because we can't calculate work. There is energy stored in the car ( potential) but when it begins to move it becomes kinetic.

 .83 m/s

     Reflection: Our original design featured a tapir wheel design big in the back small in the front and a mouse trap with strings attached to the axel. We initially had trouble with the cart because the axels had too much friction in it. To solve it I took the tap off the axels to where it went in the car and it worked wonders. Friction became my arch enemy during this project. Ugh I hate determining the right amount of friction to use our friction problems initially kept our car from moving. If I could redo this I would use lighter wood more glue and CDs would be my wheels from the beginning. I would also do more research to make the most efficient model ever, I would import my materials from abroad and grease my axels.