Unknown Mass Lab

Purpose:

Using what we know about springs, we have to calculate what is the unknown hanging mass and propagate the uncertainty.

Lab Set Up:

The apparatus was already setup by the professor. Spring 1 is the top left and Spring 2 is the top right. Here we measure the spring's forces and angle to determine the unknown mass.

In this setup, we only take account for the y components because the x components has no effects. We set the sum of y components equal to mg and solve for mass. For the uncertainty, we used the known uncertainties from the springs and protractor. 

This is the equation we used to determine the uncertainties.

This the uncertainty for the unknown mass. We plugged in the measured values into the equation and solved. 

For our unknown mass, we calculated a value of 0.531± 0.8kg. The value seems reasonably accurate.  The photo below is our work for the mass. 

Summary:

In this lab, we measured the forces from each spring and the angles. From there we setup a net force equation equal to mg and solved for mass. For uncertainty, we took the derivative for each measured valued.