Investigating the effects of forces and acceleration Essay Example

joining all four pieces together. Then drop from a height of 2m, I will then time from when I drop the parachute to when the parachute lands to get the time of the acceleration of the parachute. As it is very difficult to time exactly when the parachute was dropped and landed I will repeat this ten times and then work out an average. This will make my results more accurate. I will repeat this again with the parachute that is 15cm by 15cm and then the same with the 20cm by 20cm.

Prediction

I predict that when I do my experiment the bigger the surface area of he parachute the longer the parachute will take to reach the ground. I think this because the bigger the parachute the more air resistance there is underneath the parachute and it's the air resistance, which keeps the parachute in the air. The bigger the air resistance the quicker the terminal speed is reached. The terminal speed is when the force acting down an object (gravity) is equal to the force acting up on the object (air resistance.) The terminal speed of an object is what speed the object is falling down all and all through an objects decent it is quickening (until it reaches it terminal speed. The quicker it reaches its terminal speed, the slower the object will descend.

When I did this experiment the method I se worked really well and I didn't do anything different than what I wrote in my plan. I believe that my results are accurate as I tried to make my experiment as fair as possible by timing the parachutes ten times so

that I could get an average as this helps to make sure the results are as accurate as possible as this is supposed to take out any timing errors that I was sure to get as it was very difficult to time the parachute completely accurately. I also used the same weight and the same pieces of string on each parachute. I made sure I sellotaped the pieces of string in the same place on each parachute as that could also affect my results if I didn't do this.

If I were to do this experiment again I could improve it by dropping each parachute more than ten times to make my results that more accurate.

I could extend my investigating further by making more parachutes and trying different materials. I could also do an investigation using the same sized parachute but change the weight each time, this would tell me the relationship between the force and the weight.