There are two types of friction that affected the performance of our vehicle. The two specific types of friction being sliding friction and rolling friction. Sliding friction is when an object glides across a surface. The DVD’s slid across the surface of the ground as they spun. Rolling friction is the friction that comes from wheels. We had rolling friction interacting on all four of our wheels.
The problems we encountered relating to friction were little to none. We encountered very little friction coming from the fishing line. Our fishing line was smooth and was attached to a very smooth colored pencil. If we had encountered any problem with friction around the wheels, we would have wrapped electrical tape around the wheels to help reduce friction.
The factors we took into account to determine the number of wheels we needed were…show more content… Newton’s first law states that an object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an equal or opposite force. Our mousetrap car could not move on its own. It could only move when a force acted upon it. The force in our experiment being the force of our mousetrap car. The thing that stopped our cart from moving was the friction and gravity acting upon it. Newton’s second law states that F= m x a. You need a lot of force to push a cart with greater mass. Our vehicle would have traveled farther if we used a rat trap instead of a mousetrap. In order to find the force of our cart, we could have measured its mass and then figured out how many meters per second our cart traveled. Newton’s third law states that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Setting off the mousetrap unwound our fishing line that was wrapped around our colored pencil. Everytime the line unwound, the colored pencil spun. This made our cart move forwards. Setting off our trap was the action but the car moving forwards was the opposite
