The Physics of Roller Coasters

Overview

Objectives/Goals My favorite subject being math, I wanted to do something that included many formulas and calculations. I decided to design an experiment in which I could learn more about how roller coasters work and what forces act upon them. After completing my research, I decided to build a roller coaster for marbles out of 1 inch foam pipe insulation. Methods/Materials I made a loop 11 inches in diameter and then I used the extra track to make a starting hill exactly 20 inches away from the bottom of the loop. I started with a hill height of 20 inches and then worked my way up or down until I found a height that got the marble through the loop 10 out of 10 times. Results I found that the lowest height at which the marble made the loop all 10 times was 22.5 inches. After that, I did my calculations. First, I figured out how steep the slope of the winning height was by using Sine to calculate the angle of elevation. Then, I calculated the marble's potential energy. Lastly, I calculated how big my loop could have been, based on the height of my hill, had no energy been lost to outside forces like friction (kinetic energy = potential energy.) My loop could have been 44 percent larger than it actually was. Conclusions/Discussion I think that the main reason for the loss of energy was movement of the track. If I had built a solid, steady wooden frame, then I would have lost less potential energy. If I were to continue this project, I would try to isolate different aspects of what caused the loss of energy, and I would use the wobbling track as my starting point.

Competition history

• CSEF 2010 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry J0223

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 2010 project