Standing Waves

This writeup is to give you some guidance about writing up the standing waves lab. Here are a few helpful (I hope) points.

1. The writeup should be fairly short, no more than about 3 pages, double spaced, figures. You can exclude the figures from you page count, particularly since the LP figures have really small type and so have to be made large. If you see your report going more than 6 pages, talk to me!
2. Be sure that you include relevant images in your writeup (several images from the your movies and graphs from loggerpro - you can use screen shots from loggerpro). You should also turn in your loggerpro file (just email it to me). All Figures and tables should have captions and be referenced in your text. All movies should be posted to the facebook page.
3. It will consist of 4 parts:
   • Background: What are standing waves, Give some examples from engineering or biological applications. How do you model standing waves, what are the relevant equations?
   As in the pendulum lab, you could for each of the parts, write the experiment, result, and the do an overall discussion for all three together for a nice flow.
   • Experimental description: materials, protocol - enough detail for someone to repeat your experiment.
   • Results: Show your images, describe calculations, fits to the data, plots from loggerpro. Be explicit about errors here. Show data and fits to the data on the same graph. What are standard deviations?
     For the calculation of the wave speed, do a graphical analyis to find this, as you did in the pendulum lab and we discussed in class. You are likely to have used only two weights, so you can compare the wave speeds determined with the prediction from the tension.
     For the torsional pendulum,
     1. If your movies are good enough, you should be able to determine the period of the oscillation. Take a single frame of the standing wave and use the insert image with photo analysis option. You can us ethe insert point tool to trace the waveform. Fit this and determine the wavelength.
     2. If your moies are not so good, do as much as you can.
     3. In either case, give some discussion of how you could have made your videos better.
   • Discussion. Here you want to link your data analysis to the model. How well did the model describe the data.? What were the errors? The discussion should end with a conclusion/summary of the lab.