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course PHY 232
3/29 9pm
Experiment kinmodel_03: Equipartition of energy and the direction of disorder to (increasing or decreasing)Observe the first several seconds of the simulation at the 'slow' default speed. You will see how the particles initially are all moving in or very close to the x direction, with little or no y component. Note the x and y kinetic energies, displayed near the top of the screen.
• Observe what happens to the directions of motion of the particles as they start colliding.
• Observe what happens to the x and y kinetic energies.
• Is the system more organized at the beginning of the simulation or after a couple of minutes?
• If the x and y kinetic energies were averaged for 100 years, starting a few minutes after the simulation began, which do you think would be greater?
The balls that are indicated to have lower mass are effected more by striking another ball, changing direction, and in change to velocity.
It seems X and Y rise and fall periodically. Neither remains dominant permanently.
The system is more organized at the beginning.
I believe the averages would be pretty close because the X and Y are changing randomly based on the angles and direction the other particles strike the ‘tracked particle’ at.
Run the simulation in this manner several times, and each time determine how long it takes before the total y kinetic energy is first greater than the total x kinetic energy. Report your results.
When the X starts higher it took about 3 seconds; however, many times the Y started higher. Once again this may be different than what you were looking for because I was using the windows version using the restart and run simulation buttons to restart it.
Now take some data:
• Running at the fastest default speed, stop the simulation with the pause/break key every few seconds, keeping your eyes closed for at least 2 seconds before stopping the motion.
• Write down the x and y kinetic energies each time.
• Do this at least 30 times.
• Find the average of all your x and all your y kinetic energies.
• Do you believe the difference in the averages is significant, in that the direction that has the higher average will always tend to have the higher average every time the simulation is run?
X Y
832 1003
638 1198
872 964
854 982
603 1233
844 992
850 987
866 971
1211 625
837 1000
883 953
814 1023
640 1196
788 1049
766 1071
564 1273
699 1138
778 1059
880 958
752 1085
1049 788
691 1147
1036 801
1020 818
1012 826
1015 823
818 1020
936 902
820 1019
955 883
Averages
X Y
844.1 992.9
This is a 15% difference which would be significant; however, if we increase the sample size this should shrink. Furthermore, the X could just as easily be the higher average if we did another sample of 30.
&#Your work on this lab exercise looks very good. Let me know if you have any questions. &#