Use the torque-balance method to find the force of this same fan.What is the impulse from a soda bottle rocket?.I admit that you will have to get creative to find data for this since the wheels go to the right and not the left. Find the effective force from a driven wheel.What about different motors with the same fan? What about a propeller instead of a fan?.I assume that different wheels have different frictional coefficients.Try finding the acceleration of a large and small car.
Does the acceleration of a car with friction depend on the mass of the object? In the real world, this would mostly be mass independent.
The slope of this function would be the fan force and the y-intercept would be the friction coefficient (not technically the coefficient of friction-but related). 1/mass, this should be a linear function. If I collect data and plot acceleration vs. But here I have a function that gives a relationship between acceleration (which I can measure) and the mass (which I don't actually know, but I do know that it changes). Yes, I skipped a couple of algebraic steps-I'm sure you can figure it out or don't want to see the details. If I say that this frictional force is just proportional to mass (just a guess at this point), then I can write the net forces as: This means a more massive car would have a greater frictional force.
In the real world, this frictional force depends on the force the ground pushes up on the car. We might have a small problem with the frictional force. Since the car is only going to move horizontally, we can just look at the two forces-friction and the fan. There are essentially four forces in this net force. If the net force is constant, increasing the mass should decrease the acceleration. Yes, force and acceleration are actually vectors-but in one dimension, I can write them as scalars.