Experiment Name: Determination of the acceleration due to gravity ‘g’ by

means of a compound pendulum.

Abstract: There are many ways of measuring this gravity acceleration, but the
experiment of compound pendulum is the easiest and effective among them. In
the experiment the acceleration due to gravity was measured using the rigid
pendulum method. In this experiment the value of acceleration due gravity by
means of compound pendulum is obtained and it is 988.384 cm per sec with an
error of 0.752%. Which is negotiable amount of error but it needs to be justified
properly.
Theory: A pendulum exhibits simple harmonic motion (SHM), which allowed
us to measure the gravitational constant by measuring the period of the
pendulum. The period, T, of a pendulum of length Undergoing simple harmonic
motion is given by:

Thus, by measuring the period of a pendulum as well as its length, we can

determine the value of g:

Predictions: We built the pendulum with a length L=1.0000±0.0005m that was

measured with a ruler with 1mm graduations (thus a negligible uncertainty in
L). We plan to measure the period of one oscillation by measuring the time to it
takes the pendulum to go through 20 oscillations and dividing that by 20. The
period for one oscillation, based on our value of L and the accepted value for g,
is expected to be T=2.0s. We expect that we can measure the time for 20
oscillations with an uncertainty of 0.5s. We thus expect to measure one
oscillation with an uncertainty of 0.025s (about 1% relative uncertainty on the
period). We thus expect that we should be able to measure g with a relative
uncertainty of the order of 1%.
Procedure: The experiment was conducted in a laboratory indoors.
1. Construction of the pendulum
We constructed the pendulum by attaching an inextensible string to a stand on
one end and to a mass on the other end. The mass, string and stand were
attached together with knots. We adjusted the knots so that the length of the
pendulum was 1.0000±0.0005m. The uncertainty is given by half of the smallest
division of the ruler that we used.
2. Measurement of the period
The pendulum was released from 90 and its period was measured by filming the
pendulum with a cell-phone camera and using the phone’s built-in time. In order
to minimize the uncertainty in the period, we measured the time for the
pendulum to make 20 oscillations, and divided that time by 20. We repeated this
measurement five times. We transcribed the measurements from the cell-phone
into a Jupiter Notebook.
Data and Analysis: Using a 100g mass and 1.0m ruler stick, the period of 20
oscillations was measured over 5 trials. The corresponding value of g for each
of these trials was calculated. The following data for each trial and
corresponding value of g are shown in the table below.
Tabular Analysis:
Our final measured value of g is (7.65±0.378) m/s2. This was calculated using
the mean of the values of g from the last column and the corresponding standard
deviation. The relative uncertainty on our measured value of g is 4.9 % and the
relative difference with the accepted value of 9.8m/s2 is 22%, well above our
relative uncertainty.
Discussion and Conclusion:
In this experiment, we measured g= (7.65±0.378) m/s2. This has a relative
difference of 22% with the accepted value and our measured value is not
consistent with the accepted value. All of our measured values were
systematically lower than expected, as our measured periods were all
systematically higher than the § 2.0s that we expected from our prediction. We
also found that our measurement of g had a much larger uncertainty (as
determined from the spread in values that we obtained), compared to the 1 %
relative uncertainty that we predicted.
We suspect that by using 10 oscillations, the pendulum slowed down due to
friction, and this resulted in a deviation from simple harmonic motion. This is
consistent with the fact that our measured periods are systematically higher. We
also worry that we were not able to accurately measure the angle from which
the pendulum was released, as we did not use a protractor.
If this experiment could be redone, measuring 10 oscillations of the pendulum,
rather than 20 oscillations, could provide a more precise value of g.
Additionally, a protractor could be taped to the top of the pendulum stand, with
the ruler taped to the protractor. This way, the pendulum could be dropped from
a near-perfect 90∘ rather than a rough estimate.

Experiment Name: Determination of the length of a rod by the slide callipers.

Abstract
Theory
Procedure
Data and Analysis
Tabular Analysis
Discussion and Conclusion