Motor!

Cheeeeee finally :)

A Glue Gun and Physics

While I was redecorating my room this past weekend, I needed to use a hot glue gun to attach an old pair of sunglasses to my wall.  When I was gluing the glasses on, I recognized that the side of the glue gun showed me how much voltage flowed through the appliance, and the number of watts that was in it.  I then realized that this was physics! In order for the gun to heat up and melt the plastic glue, an electric current needed to be flowing through the wires from the wall.  Like a standard wall outlet, the glue gun had 120 V running through it.  The output of the circuit was 10W.  According to the equation P=IV, the current flowing through the appliance was 1/12 A.

Outlets and Physics

This weekend as I was cleaning my room, I needed to unplug my lamp to plug in the vacuum cleaner. However, I forgot to turn off the light before I unplugged the wire. When I did so, a spark was formed. I realized that I failed to complete the circuit and the spark was the circuit breaking.  This could be dangerous because if my hand was near the outlet, I could've been zapped.  This surge of energy is kind of like the energy released by a capacitor when it is being discharged.  I probably would've felt the same shock that I felt as I touched the three buttons on the camera. 

Physics in a Pirouette

With this busy weekend, I had to find some time to work on my solo project for dance.  While trying to choreograph, I remembered that dance had some relevance to physics! As I prepared for a turn, the distance between my foot and my other leg became the lever arm.  The force applied as I bent my supporting legs with the length between my legs became the torque that was exerted during the turn.  This torque resulted in the rotation of my body into three turns.  When I pull my leg up near my supporting leg, this causes me to turn faster.  Here are some pictures to show the physics of a pirouette.

Physics Video!

This weekend, our physics project was due. We initially wanted to show ourselves as human projectiles. However, on the Logger Pro program, we saw that it was not really possible to correlate the points to the body parts and the results would not be as accurate, as the points would not create a clean arc. So we used a ball as our projectile, and myself as the height from which the projectile traveled. From there we calculated the initial and final velocities, how long it would take for the ball to reach the water, as well as the horizontal distance that the ball traveled. We solved these using the kinematics equations from quarter one and the conservation of energy formula. Included below is one of the videos that we decided not to use, and the final video that we ended up using.