MAPUA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

Department of Physics

Experiment 201

WORK, ENERGY AND POWER

Name: CASTILLANES, JOBERT O.

Program/Year: GEO-2
Course code/Section: PHY11L/A6
Student No.: 2012109244

Prof. Bernard Aguirre

DATA and OBSERVATIONS

TABLE 1. PART 1. Determining the Force, Work and Power

of the Fan cart.
Force of the Fan Cart = weight of pan + weight added = 0.54 N
Displacement,
S

Trial

Time, t

Work

Power

0.60

0.75

sec

0.32

Joules

0.43

Watts

0.55

0.74

sec

0.30

Joules

0.40

Watts

0.50

0.73

sec

0.27

Joules

0.37

Watts

0.67

sec

0.24

Joules

0.36

Watts

0.45

Table 2. Part 2. Work by a Force on a Curved Path.

Length of string, L= 0.19m

Trial

Final
height, hf

Force

0.18
m
0.20
m
0.22
m
0.25
m

Weight of mass, w= 4.9 N

Increase
height,
h

Angle,

Displace
ment, X

Initial Height, ho = 0.10m

Work

0.08 m

36.20

0.11 m

0.18 Joules

0.10 m

41.90

0.13 m

0.24 Joules

0.13 m

48.40

0.14 m

0.31 Joules

015 m

63.47

0.17 m

0.52 Joules

Gravitatio
nal
potentia
energy
0.3
Joule
0.4
Joule
0.6
Joule
0.7
Joule

GUIDE QUESTIONS
Part1.
1. In part 1, should the work done be increasing in every trial? Explain.
The answer is No. The work done in every trial should not be
increasing, rather the work should be decreasing in every trial. The
formula in finding work is W= F*s, where F is the magnitude of force
acting on the body and s is the displacement of the body. So the two
quantities involved here are Force (F) and the displacement (s). The
force here in this experiment is constant which is 0.54 Newton and the
only varying factor is the displacement .Our group decreases the
displacement by 0.05 m for every trial. Based on our groups data for
part 1, the work decreases as the displacement decreases. You will get
a lower value of work when you multiply a lower value of displacement
to the constant value of force acting on the body. Therefore, work is
directly proportional to the value of the displacement. The lower the
displacement, the lower the work.

2. In part 1, should the power expended be increasing every trial?

Explain.
In our data, the values of power are 0.43, 0.40, 0.37 and 0.36 which is
decreasing. But if you get the mean value of power which is 0.40 that
is very close to all the values of power in every trial, therefore the
power expended does not decreasing that much.

Part 2.
1. In figure 6, why is it incorrect to calculate the work done by
multiplying the spring balance reading F and the horizontal
displacement x?
It is incorrect to calculate the work done by multiplying the spring balance
reading F and the horizontal displacement x because the force F is
changing in magnitude and direction on a curved path. Since the direction
of the displacement of an object is horizontal or in x-axis, the value of
force F must be in horizontal or parallel to it and not in vertical because
when you multiply the force in y-axis and the displacement in x- axis, the
value of work is zero. The equation to be used to get the value of work is
W= wL(1-cos ) where w is the weight of mass in Newtons, L is the

length of the string in meters, and

is the angle of the strings with the

vertical in degrees.

GRAPHS

Displacement vs Work
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
WORK

0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0.6

0.55000000000000004
DISPLACEMENT

DISPLACEMENT vs WORK

0.5

0.45

Displacement vs Power
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
Power

0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0.6

0.55000000000000004

0.5

0.45

Displacement

DISPLACEMENT vs POWER
INTERPRETATION OF RESULT

This experiment is all about Work, Energy and Power. In this

experiment, were able to compute for the values of work at different trials.
To define work, work is the product of Force applied on the body times the
displacement of an object. Power is defined as the rate of doing work. It is
the quotient of work (W) over time. Rate is always associated with time
thats why in this experiment time was also recorded on our data sheet.

In part 1 of this experiment, we are asked to determine the Force, Work

and Power of the fan cart. To compute for the value of work, we used the
formula W= F*s, where F is the force acting on the body and s as the
displacement of the object. The direction of F and s must be the same so that
the desired value is correct while if you multiply the two and they are
perpendicular to each other, the answer that you will get is zero (0). It means
that there was no wok done. On our experiment, the two variables are
parallel to each other so we can get the value of work. We noticed that when
we multiply the lower value of displacement to the force, we also get a lower
value for work. So in this graph below we can see how the value of
displacement affects the value of work.

Displacement vs Work
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
WORK

0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0.6

0.55000000000000004

0.5

0.45

DISPLACEMENT

The graph only shows the relationship between the displacements to work.
The relationship between is that when the displacement of an object
decreases the value of work also decreases.

To compute for the value of power, the formula we used is P= W/t,

where w is the work and t is the time to cover a certain distance using the
photogates. The unit for power is joule per sec or watt. Below is the graph
between displacement and the work of the object. We can see on the
graph that the power decreases as the distance travelled by the object
decreases. The shorter the distance it travelled, the shorter the time it
took to reach the second photogates. According to the law of conservation
of energy, Energy is neither created nor destroyed but is just changed
from one form to another. So the rate of work here is constant since
small differences can be observed on the values of power.

Displacement vs Power
0.35
0.3
0.25
0.2
Power

0.15
0.1
0.05
0
0.6

0.55000000000000004

0.5

0.45

Displacement

In part 2 of this experiment we are asked to find for the work by a force
on a curved path. We cannot directly multiply the force to the
displacement since the force changes its magnitude and direction. If we
do so, the value is not correct because the force must be parallel to the
displacement. In each trial, we used the formula W=wL(1-cos ) to get
the value of work. The formula for Gravitational Potential Energy is PE=
mgh.
The possible source or cause of error in this experiment is that our
group did not convert the values to the desired units that why our
computation becomes incorrect, we did not cooperate well to each other
or we lack cooperation and strategy to make the experiment easy and
accurate.