Waves Lab

Guiding Question: Does the weight or the surface area of an object make the largest waves if the object is moved vertically up and down at a constant speed?

Hypothesis: The heavier materials are going to make the balls move faster to the sides of the tub, since are heavier and cause a greater water disturbance and produce bigger waves. The surface area isn’t going to impact anything,

Materials:
4 ping pong balls
Marker with circle base
Small water bottle
Clay barrier
Tub
Water
Timer

Procedure:
1.) Fill a 40*32 cm tub halfway with water. This should be about 4 large cups.
2.) Put your marker hovering up in the air about 2 cm above water surface, in the middle of the tub. Put four ping pong balls around the tip of the marker closest to the water. They should be in a square shape. Then, find a consistent speed and move the marker up and down. Time how much time it takes for all of the ping pong balls to reach the sides of the tub. Make three trials.
3.) Do the same thing, only now using the clay barrier instead of the marker. Notice how the ping pong balls move differently, and mke three trials.
4.) Now, use the small water bottle and make waves. Be very careful- don’t let it touch the bottom of the tub. Make three trials and observe.
5.) Now, find the mean of the three trials for each material.

Data:

	Marker	Clay Barrier	Small water bottle
Trial 1	17.1	9.1	3.8
Trial 2	20.2	5.3	6.1
Trial 3	16.4	8.6	3.1
Mean/Average	17.9	7.666(...)	4.333(...)

Data Analysis:
Looking at my data I can clearly see that the marker took the longest to make all the ping pong balls to touch the sides of the tub, then the clay barrier and lastly the small water bottle. Something I noticed while doing the lab was that if I made the marker, barrier, or water bottle move in an up and down motion so that they touched the bottom of the tub they would alter the path of the ball. This is probably because there are waves going on at the bottom of the tub too, and the waves intercept with the ones from the surface of the water. There are no major outliers in my data, only possibly that the first trial with the water bottle took 6.1 seconds, while the second trial with the clay barrier only took 5.3 seconds. In this case the clay barrier made the ping pong balls move faster than the water bottle. This might have been because of inconsistent speed, or that the speed of the two different trials were different. However, in the mean there was no sign of the clay barrier causing faster movement in the ping pong balls. This indicates that the other trials were more correct, and that we need three trials to make correct assumptions. Something else I noticed was that the mean of the clay barrier and the water bottle were a lot closer than the marker. This doesn’t really make logical sense, since the marker and the clay barrier are closer in size (surface area) than the water bottle, they have more of the same surface area than the clay barrier and the water bottle. Maybe this is because of the outlier of before, of maybe it is because the properties in the marker and the clay is different than the water bottle.

Conclusion:
I think that this was a very interesting lab, and all the waves that go on everywhere are just amazing. It was especially fun since we could make our own lab, so everyone came up with different conclusions about different things in the areas that interested them the most. I found my lab interesting since I found out that the bigger the surface area or amount of space something making the waves takes up, the stronger the waves are. My hypothesis wasn’t correct, since its the surface area that affects how big the waves are, or at least more than the weight. However, in a way it was correct, since if you would drop an empty small bottle of water in still water you might not get as big as a wave as if you dropped the clay barrier, which would be a lot heavier. (My prediction) However, when given roughly the same pressure and a consistent up and down movement the small water bottle created more waves in the water than the clay barrier and the marker, making the balls go to the edge of the tub faster.Therefore, the bigger the surface area causing the disturbance the larger the waves are.


Further Inquiry:
I think this lab was pretty interesting, but if I were to do it again I might want to try some of my classmates labs. One that I found was pretty cool was the one where Sophie used many different liquids to see where the waves would turn out best. It would be pretty interesting to watch how the density of the liquids change the way waves are being made, if they are being made at all. Another lab I might want to try is the one in the tank, where you observe the waves being made when all you do is move the tank back and forth. Then they kind of go up on the sides, and I think it would be really amazing to observe that and find a scientific explanation to why the waves act the way they’re acting. I would also want to try a lab where you drop an object into water from about half a meters distance, and then watch the waves being made. This lab would kind of fit with the one I just made, like a sequal, nr 2. It would be an interesting continuation to see if the clay barrier and the marker make more waves than the empty small water bottle. Off course, this would be a very messy lab, so it would probably be better to do it outdoors in spring sometime, instead of spraying the whole classroom. :)