Sunday, January 13, 2013

Making Waves Lab

Bethany
7B
Science
1/12/2012

Making Waves Lab
Guiding Question: 
1. When Water is dropped from a pipette into a pan of water, how does the wave behave?
2. What properties does a mechanical wave have?
3. How do waves interact with each other and with solid objects in their paths? 

Hypothesis (to question 3):
I think that when a wave interacts with a sold object they cannot go through  the barrier. I think that the wave with crash into the solid object and then crash back into a lighter wave. This also will allow a small splash. This depends on how big the wave is. Also if there was a gap I think only a little bit of water would go through because the wave would all be trying to go through the gap at once.




 Data analysis
            Our experiment was to see how the water would react when we put barriers or dropped drops of water in different parts of the container. I learned that when the wave hits a barrier it cannot go through it instead the wave bounces back from the barrier. If there is a gap between two barriers the water will go through the gap once it has entered the other side it grows calm. This is because a drop of water doesn't have enough force to continue the wave. If the drop of water had lots more force, the wave would go between the barriers and still have enough force to continue the wave. When we placed a cork in the water to represent a boat we found out that it needs more force and if the cork did move then it would go very slowly in one direction. If a barrier was in the boats way it would just bob up and down. It wouldn't go through the slit between the barriers. We also found out that it matters where the droplet of water lands. If you drop some water in the middle the waves with be circular. If you drop the water in a corner it would make half circles smaller then gradually growing bigger. If you tap the side of the pan it would make square waves. This is cool because I understood that there were different types of waves but I never did more research to determine how these waves are made!


        When we did the, "Make waves with a faucet" game I found out that it was sort of the same as what we did because if we placed the faucet in the middle it would make circular waves. Same as if we used a pipette. Also the bigger the drop the stronger the wave was. If we did the continuation of drops in a fast pace the waves would never stop or slow down and the waves would be very close together. If we did the drops in a very slow pace the waves would die out until another large drop of water came. The waves slowed down even faster when the drop of water was very small. If the drop of water was tiny there would not be any wave that you cold see. If you looked at the graph there was a small disturbance in the water but not much because of how small the drop of water was. You could also notice the darker the lines the stronger the wave was. I wonder what would happen if the faucet was farther up? Would the wave be stronger because the drop of water was falling from greater heights? Does it matter how high you hold the faucet/ pipette?


         In conclusion my hypothesis was correct for question three because the wave couldn't go through the clay, the wave was not strong enough to create any splash but I think it would have if the wave were bigger. Also my hypothesis was correct and incorrect because I said that only only a little bit of water would escape. This is true but it is also incorrect because the water wasn't fighting to get between the gap. I wonder if we had tiny holes in the clay would water go through them? Next time I think we should try different things with the clay. Also it would be fun if we created bigger waves with heavier forces so that our data can be more accurate! I also wonder what would happen if the white container was tipped slightly!


No comments:

Post a Comment