Friction

Tomorrow's session will deal with friction. It's not my favourite topic, it's not really fundamental physics and the treatment at this level is a little fictitious.

As a challenge you can review your results of the inertial mass measurement in Unit 5 Session 3.  (You measured the accelerations of a fan-cart with and without a bar of known mass on it.) The mass you calculated was systematically wrong because friction was neglected.

Try to figure out how to take friction into account...

1. How would you experimentally measure the coefficient of kinetic friction in the movement of the fan cart?
2. How can you correct the mass calculations using the measured coefficient of kinetic friction?
3. How could you have modified the expriment of Unit 5 so that the systematic error due to friction would have been reduced?