Rocket Car Acceleration

Our assignment was to create a rocket car using a hot wheel car and a model rocket motor. The best cars for this project are going to be hot wheels that are school busses, ambiences, and vans. The goal was to have our Rocket Cars travel a distance of four meters and then figure out the speed, average speed, acceleration per meter, and velocity.

Materials Needed

· Hot wheel car (our cars weight was 61.9 grams)

· Hot glue gun

· 2 one inch Hollow pen tube

· Scissors

· Model Rocket Motor

· 18’ 2X4

· 38 feet of steal wire

· Two, two inch angle iron

· Drill with bits

Acquire hot wheel. I used a Van and used a drill to hollow out the back doors. Drill a hole in the car so the model rocket motor will fit inside of the vehicle. Once this is done insert the model rocket motor into the car and glue in place.

(Note: back of the motor is towards the front of the car)

Once the motor is mounted into place mount the two pen tubs on the side of the hot wheel.

(Note: shown car does not have pen tubes mounted on the side but rather on top of the car.)

Now for the Track:

attach angle iron onto both ends of the 2X4. attach by drilling holes in base of angle iron and screwing into place (see Photo)

Now drill holes into angle iron so wire can be ran on both sides of the track....
Wire should be about one inch apart so wire can be fed through tubes on car

Feed each wire through each individual pen tube so car will roll on the 2X4 while running on the guide wires

(note: wires must be pulled tight)

Now you can launch the car. We used the verner Logger Pro system to measure our cars Velocity

(Note: Distance for data is per one meter)

time to go:

one meter: .860109 sec.

two meters: .922248 sec.

Average speed: .8911785 sec per meter or 1.122109656 meters per second

Instantaneous Speed: your kidding right.

The average speed/velocity from the 1st photogate to the 3rd photogate was: 0.2958492 m/s
The average speed/velocity from the 3rd photogate to the 4th photogate was: 1.247256 m/s
The average speed/velocity from the 1st photogate to the 4th photogate was: 0.4764332 m/s
The acceleration from the 1st photogate to the 4th photogate was: 4.5331097 m/s^2

unfortunately, we were not able to obtain all five meters worth of data because of problems with the Verner system

Conclusion

We concluded that the friction created through the wires running through the straw and the hot wheels tires not rolling that the car not as fast as advertised. We also concluded that despite the friction Newton's second law which states, that the force applied to a body produces a proportional acceleration, is very apparent in this lab. The angle iron at the end of the track was the object that stopped our cars inertia witch was caused by the initial force of the rocket going off.