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UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS Guest
2024-11-23 18:11 |
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Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2017 Meeting
Section: Physics Education
Title:
The study of the uniform circular motion using the accelerometer of the smartphone
Authors:
Marin OPREA (1,2), Cristina MIRON (1)
*
Affiliation:
1)University of Bucharest, Faculty of Physics, P.O.Box MG-11, Magurele, 077125 Bucharest, Romania
2)"Mihai Viteazul" School, Calarasi, Romania
E-mail
opreamarin2007@yahoo.com
Keywords:
circular motion, smartphone, accelerometer, centripetal acceleration,
angular speed, frequency, tangential speed
Abstract:
Physics teachers nowadays can make use of the sensors present in a smartphone in order to perform a series of relevant physical experiments in class. An important chapter that can be approached this way is the study of the uniform circular motion, the calculus of its parameters and the study of the dependence of these parameters on the radius of the body trajectory. The application Linear Accelerometer enables students to track in real time and record the values of the Cartesian components of the smartphone acceleration. The students placed the smartphone on rotational platforms of different diameters which performed a circular motion. The platforms consisted of a vinyl disc, a bicycle wheel and a merry-go-round in a theme park. In the beginning, we accurately established the position coordinates of the acceleration sensor on the smartphone’s motherboard. The next step consisted in studying the graphs displaying the time dependence of the horizontal components of acceleration. These graphs contain three areas: an area situated at the beginning of the graph which corresponds to the accelerated motion of the rotational platform, an intermediate area showing the uniform circular motion and an area situated at the end of the graph displaying the decelerated motion. For the areas of the graph associated with the uniform circular motion we calculated, for each individual case, the values of the centripetal acceleration, of the period and the rotation frequency, of the tangential speed, of the angular speed and of the centrifugal forces. Moreover, we drew the graphs showing the dependence of the centripetal acceleration, tangential speed and centrifugal force on the radius of the trajectory.
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