Constituents that Affect an Object's Friction on Non-Stable Surfaces

Overview

Objectives/Goals This project is to demonstrate what alternate materials can be used as a substitution for the traditional snow chains in snow or ice in the event of an absence of proper traction equipment. Methods/Materials Materials: Car tire, sandpaper, silicon pot/pan holding pad, cling/plastic wrap, insole of shoe, bottom of shoe, bottle caps, tin cans, bungee cords, standard chains, supercooled water, spring scale, asphalt road, PVC pipe Procedure: 1.Prep the asphalt road with ice shavings to simulate snowy and icy conditions 2.Attach a harness of PVC pipe to the center of the wheel 3.Attach the selected material to the tire 4.Attach the spring scale to the end of the PVC harness 5.Pull carefully on the spring scale parallel to the ground until the tire slides. When the tire moves, the scale will read how much force it took to move the tire 6.Reset the supercooled water, and repeat steps 3-5 with different materials Preform at least 3 trials for each material and record results Results In this experiment, materials were shown to not perform as well as standard tire chains. However, there were various materials that came very close like the bottle caps which differed by mere 0.2 Newtons. Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis was wrong in stating that I could find a material that could possibly out-perform standard tire chains, I did find several materials that could used come close to the traction of standard chains including the bottle caps. Some small source of error in this procedure may have included the tire rotation as appose to sliding on the slick surface. However I tried to counter that by pulling on the spring scale parallel to the ground. Another source of error could have been Newtons lost in the PVC framing system to pull the tire,but this is why I used PVC as appose to another material- because it is sturdy and will not stretch to lose energy or force. What I have found through this experiment is that if someone is driving on a icy or snowy road without proper traction gear, someone could use any of the materials that he/she might have in their vehicle that were tested and have been shown to have more friction on the road than with a bare wheel besides the plastic wrap.

Competition history

• CSEF 2014 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry S0325

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Engineering projects
• CSEF Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2014 project