3/19 Coulomb's Law and Electric Charge

We are asked to predict the behavior of a statically charged balloon on a glass window. The balloon was charged using hair then silk to see if there would be any changes. The balloon stuck to the glass both times. Then we wrote out a way to explain to a child what charge is. 

We are introduced to Coulomb's Law and used the formula to find the electric force between two charges.

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The above two pictures are from our lab where we conducted an experiment using Logger Pro 

This is when the machine is turned on. The electric charge wants to escape to its surroundings thus making the paper stick out like spikes.

This picture shows the device turned on but with the paper dangling. This is because the metal on the propellor is a better conductor than paper which allows charge to escape through it better than paper. This caused the propellor to spin clockwise.

We conducted an experiment using a machine that could generate an electric charge to see if a propellor would spin or bounce off the machine.

We used Coulomb's Law and the gravitational force equations to derive the ratio between the Force of Gravity and Coulomb's Force.

This is the relationship an electric force, F, and the distance, D, the forces are separated by. 

This is the graph from our experiment where we used a premade video of two metal balls repelling each other. The graph on the right is the positions of both the balls between 0-10 seconds. The graph on the left shows the Force of the two balls acting on each other versus the distance they are apart from each other. It showed that our predictions on the relationship between Force and Distance are correct.

We used our knowledge of mechanics from a previous physics class to derive an equation that would solve for the force of the swinging ball.

We used two pieces of tape to show that oppositely charged objects will attract each other. We used the table to reverse the charge on one piece of tape.

These are the follow up questions that were asked after we conducted the tape experiment. We did an experiment using tape that were oppositely charged and an experiment where the tapes were the same charge. From these experiments we concluded that there is more than one charge and that the force is greater, repel or attract, the closer the tapes.