Andrew Ajaka

Mr. Duncan
AP Physics- Periods 5 and 6
Due: Thursday, February 16th, 2017
Spring Constant Lab

To start off this lab, we took an apparatus that held two different springs, one which

seemed to be tighter then the other, and had a meter stick which was put between the springs so

that we could measure it’s displacement. We then took 200 gram masses and attached them to

the spring by a hook that was attached to the weights. We looked at where the spring landed on

the meter stick relative to it’s initial position and added another weight, going up to a total of

1000 grams of added mass on each spring.

The reason that we were adding weight was due to the fact that we wanted to test whether

there was any relationship between what we initially called the tightness of the spring and its

displacement with a certain amount of added mass, even though now, with the clarity of

hindsight, we know that what we were actually trying to find was the spring constant for each of

the springs while also identifying the relationship between the spring constant and the spring’s

subsequent displacement with the same amount of spring force being applied on each spring.

After going through each of our different weight trials with each of the springs and

measuring the displacement that the spring made from it’s original position, in which it is neither

stretched nor compressed, we noticed that, as per our original predictions, the spring that looked

tighter seemed to be increasing by a smaller amount then the spring that was obviously looser,

with the more tense one only increasing by about .03 meters and the less tense one increasing by

a little over double that with each weight, as can be seen in the chart to the left. . This was

important because this would tell us that the spring force was dependent on some variable factor

depending on which spring you’re using, which we later learned was the specific spring’s spring

constant, k. We knew that the spring force would be equal to the force due to gravity of the
masses attached to the spring due to the fact that Newton’s third law states that when an object

applies a force to another object, the separate object is applying a force equal in magnitude right

back on it, but in the opposite direction. Since the force due to gravity of the weights is being

balanced by the spring, that must mean that the spring is applying a force equal in magnitude to

that of the weights force due to gravity. In order to calculate the force due to gravity, we took the

total mass we were putting on the spring and multiplied it by the acceleration due to gravity,

m
which is approximately 10 2 , as shown to the left. We then took this information and made it
s

into a chart (below), which we would use to graph, as it would categorize our information

Spring Force Elongation of Elongation

4 Newtons 0.15 meters 0.09 meters

6 Newtons 0.21 meters 0.17 meters

10 Newtons 0.365 meters 0.225 meters on the same axis in order to get a visual

understanding of the relationship between the

spring force it’s subsequent elongation with different values. We ended up with a linear

relationship for each spring, however their slopes seemed to be different. We were able to

kg
conclude that, each spring had a constant value that could be expressed in units of 2 , and the
s

tighter the spring was when it was in it’s unaltered position, the greater this constant was. The
 kg kg
slope for our initially tighter spring was 40 2 , while the slope of our looser spring was 26.67 2
s s

, as shown to the right.

12 Different Spring's Elongations when Exerting the Same Force

10

8
Spring Force (Newtons)

Stiffer Spring
6 Linear (Stiffer Spring)
Looser Spring
Linear (Looser Spring )
4

0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4

Elongation (Meters)