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ArenasField
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Homework Statement
"How does the placement of the puncture hole of a stearin engine affect the power output of the system?"
By a stearin engine, it just means an oscillating candle around a fixed point; a video can be viewed at .
I have done all of the data collection by testing different puncture hole placements and videotaping the process with a protractor in the background.
To measure the mechanical power output, I was planning on using the equation for rotational kinetic energy, KE=.5 I w^2, where "w" is the rotational velocity of the object.
I'm having trouble determining the rotational velocity of the candle. My teacher said I could use data logger pro to analyze my videos for me, but I can't find a way to do it on the program. I have read about data logger pro, and I heard that it is not possible for it to determine the rotatinoal displacement or velocity of an object.
I do have another program, however. It is called "Tracker", but I am once again having the same problem.
I CAN slow down the video and pause it every fraction of a second and manually record the angular displacement at a certain time. I could do this for several seconds and then manually calculate the angular velocity, but since the experiments go on for several minutes, I would need to find where in the experiment angular velocity is greatest.
I'm sorry if I'm not making any sense or if this isn't a very good question.
I would really appreciate it if someone could point me in the right direction.
Thank you so much in advance.
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