Wave Simulator

I went to this website, which was a wave simulator. Here is what I found:

The wave simulator is a virtual sink where you can control the speed of the water dripping (the frequency) that that creates the waves, and also the size of each drip (the amplitude). I noticed that when I increased the frequency, the wavelength shortened, and when I increased the size of the drips, the waves became more defined and the amplitude increased. This was pretty fun to play with, but I know from doing my lab, this is just a virtual demonstration and things don't work quite as conveniently or consistently in the real world. Also, recording waves from above is difficult.

Waves Lab

I recently finished my new Lab. It was my most complicated ever.

Waves in Hot and Cold Water

I.  GUIDING QUESTION: Does a wave in water travel faster/further in hot water, cold water or room temperature?

II.HYPOTHESIS: I predict that the temperature of the water in which the wave will be moving is irrelevant to the wave’s speed and distance of wave.

III.  Exploration (PLAN & DO A TEST):
         (Materials)

1. Large plastic rectangular pan
2. Marker
3. Metronome (digital or analog)
4. Camera (optional)
5. Ruler
6. Thermometer

         (Procedure) Lists the steps required to replicate the
                               experiment

1. Place a large pan on a table, and fill it with 1.5 inch of water that is about 20 degrees Celsius.
2. Next to the side of the pan, place a ruler or meter stick.
3. Directly above the pan, place a camera that will accurately record the wavelength so you can view the frames and count the waves to find the frequency later on a computer.
4. Choose a marker that you will use to create the wave. Place it bottom-down in the section of the pan where you will be creating the wave. Measure 1 inch above the top of the marker. Find some way to mark that spot, because you will be moving the marker one inch up and down to create the wave.
5. Using a digital or analog metronome, first set the beat to 60 bpm, and tap the marker up and down one inch, each tap on the metronome’s beats, all while the waves are recorded on the camera. Repeat the same test at 120 bpm, or any other speed you desire.
6. Also repeat these test with 5 degrees Celsius water, and 80 degrees Celsius water.

IV.  RECORD & ANALYZE

           A.  Data Tables:
                      

Run:	Beats Per Minute	Water Temperature
1	90	18
2	90	18
3	120	18
4	120	18
5	180	18
6	120	80
7	130	80
8	60	9
9	90	9
10	120	9

For some reason, my camera didn’t record these runs correctly, and so unfortunately don’t have the video for these runs.

          This is a comparison made from frames from the videos of each test.

C.  Analysis of Data:  I had planned to analyze my recordings of the waves by looking at the individual frames on a computer, and measure the wavelength. However, this didn’t work I the way I hoped it would have. The main reason it didn’t work was that the waves in the water were the same color as the water itself, so it was hard to see the waves in the individual frames. I was able to make some observations based on the video though.

IV.  Concept Acquisition (CONCLUSION): My guiding question was this: “Does a wave in water travel faster/further in hot water, cold water or room temperature?”. My data wasn’t nearly as reliable as I thought it would be, but I can tell from the data that I have that the temperature of the water has little to no effect on how fast/far a wave will travel. In other words, my hypothesis was correct.

V.  Concept Application (FURTHER INQUIRY): I tried really hard in this lab to produce accurate data, but despite my efforts my data wasn’t as good as I hoped. One of the main causes that I couldn’t get perfectly accurate data from my video frames of the waves was that my waves weren’t very visible in the frames. I think this is a difficult problem to solve, but I might have been able to solve it by putting food coloring into the water, to make the waves more visible. Another reason my data wasn’t as good I hoped it would be was that my camera didn’t record the trials with the cold water. To solve this problem, I should have used a better camera, and possibly even more than one camera.


UPDATE:
While I was making this lab, Mr. McKenzie (our schools technology director) came and filmed me explaining how my lab worked. Here's the video he made:

SciLink from 2-1 Notes

As part of the Section 2-1 notes, I was supposed to visit one of the sites that come up when I entered the code listed on page 47 of the notes on scilinks.com , and write about what I saw there and what I learned. I went to SciLinks, and chose this site. It's a pretty short description of how energy is released from stress in an earthquake. Apparently, when the two sides of a fault are pressed together, there is friction, which makes them resist the forces that try to move the sides of the fault apart. With that resistance, energy builds up, and deforms the fault until the fault breaks, and an earthquake is created. After the earthquakes, the return to thir previous state until enough energy builds up for a new earthquake.

Chapter 2 Section 1 Full Notes

• 
  
• Movement of tectonic plates creates forces that are stress
• Stress is a force that acts on rock to change its shape or volume.
• Since stress is force, it is stored in rock as energy until it is released when the rock breaks or changes shape.
• Tension - Stretching rock
• Compression - Pushing rock together
• Shearing - masses of rock slipping
• Tension, compression, and shearing work over millions of year to change the shape and volume of rock.
• Some rocks are brittle and snap, some bend slowly.
• Types of forces:
• Tension pulls on the rust and stretches and makes rocks thinner. It happens when two plates are moving apart.
• Compression squeezes rock until it folds or breaks. Often compresses rock.
• Shearing is when stress pushes rock into different directions, while rubbing against each other.
• 
  
• When stress build up in a rock or the tectonic plates, the rock breaks and a fault is created.
• Most faults occur along plate boundaries, where the forces of plate motion push or pull the crust so much that the crust breaks. There are three main types of faults: normal faults, reverse faults and strike-slip faults.
• Normal Faults: tension in earth crust pulls rock apart, tearing rock and creating a normal fault. In all Normal Faults, the fault is at an angle so there is a part mostly on top, and a port mostly on the bottom, like so:

__

    \____

• The part mostly above is the hanging wall, and the bottom one is the footwall.
• Reverse Faults: Caused when rock of crust is pushed together. Has same structure as normal fault, but movement is in opposite direction, which means the hanging wall moves over the footwall.
• Strike-Slip Faults: created by shearing when plates move past each other. Rocks on each side of the fault slip past eachether pretty much side to side, with no up and down motion. A SS Fault that is boundary between two plates is a transform boundary.

Changing Earth's Surface

• Over millions of years, the forces of plate movement can change a flat plain into landforms such as anticlines and synclines, folded mountains. fault-block mountains and plateaus.
• Plate movement can cause crust to fold.
• Folds: Folds are bends in rock that form when compression shortens and thickens part of Earth's crust. Can be tiny or huge.
• Anticline: fold in rock that bends upward.
• Syncline: Fold that bends downward.
• Folding produced some of largest mountain ranges, like Himalayas.

Later - From Class

• Convergent boundary = compression. Can cause mountains, volcanoes, subduction
• Divergent Boundaries = Tension
• 
  

Notes from Bill Nye - Earthquake

• Seismic plates can go up and down, side to side.
• Earth's surface is floating on melted rock
• Surface is broken into tectonic plates
• Faults- cracks in tectonic plates
• Energy can be stored in faults, and when the energy is released they cause earthquakes
• Seismometer measures earthquake
• Seismograph - writing down or recording and measuring the earthquake
• Tectonic plates move because of churning magma
• When tectonic plates move apart, volcano is formed. When they come together, mountains are formed.
• Earthquakes can because by faults up and down rubbing up and down, or side to site rubbing
• Epicenter - center origin of earthquakes
• Richter scaler - system for comparing strength of earth quake
• In Richter scale each successive number has 10x the energy of previous number
• Center of the earth is a 2800 kilometer solid core, that's why earthquakes aren't felt all the way through the earth.

What Happens When a Wave Hits a Surface?

We had another mini-experiment:
What happens when a wave hits a surface?
To do this experiment, we had a large blue piece of paper against a wall, and many different malls. I was partnered up with Maria. We wet the balls with water, and them rolled them so they hit the wall and bounced off, all while leaving a trail of water on the paper. We immediately went over the trail with a marker so we could see the trail after it was dry, and labelled what ball we used to make the trail with. Most of the time the trails looked like an upside-down V, because the ball would roll, collide with  the wall, and bounce back at an angle. That angle depended on the angle from which the ball was thrown.
We noticed a few things. First of all, the harder you roll the ball, the straiter and more consistent the line would be. Also the impact and resulting bounce off of the wall was shorter and louder with a harder roll. (That was obvious.) More about the impact: The ball always bounced off cleanly, but lost some of the energy which caused it to slow down.
Update:
After reading the textbook section, I have a new conclusion:
I found out that the angle that the angle bounced is the same angle as the ball came in, just from the other way. That didn't make much sense, so I made a illustration on a keyboard.


______
     /\
The line represents the wall, and the upside-down V is the ball's path (or the closest approximation that I could show with text).
If you measured the angle from the wall to the closest line, it would be the same as the wall to the other closest line.
Using my new vocabulary, the angle of incidence was the same as the angle of reflection.

Wave Interaction

I was exploring wave interaction in Science class with a little experiment. In this experiment, I was partnered up with Ergi, and we had a medium size bin. It was probably 1x1.75 feet, and 3 inches tall. We filled it up about halfway, and then tapped the water in two places with markers, and observed and recorded what we saw. I also repeated this experiment with clay barriers that blocked the water in certain places. I uploaded scans of my sketches that I took while observing the waves interacting. The sketches weren't all that neat, and the scan didn't show them so well, so I'm sorry for the quality.
No Barriers
I noticed that waves come together, they make a pattern almost like scales on a fish. When they come together from opposite diagonal ends, they don't really come together.
One Barrier
When the barriers where were the waves would normally interact, the waves just kept going forward until they could interact.When the water was being tapped from opposite diagonal ends, the waves didn't interact, just like before, but there were sort of "dead zones" on the opposite ends of the ones where the waves were coming from. I didn't really show this that well in my sketches.
Two Barriers
I noticed that with the two barriers, depending on the position, the barriers often left the waves "trapped" and the waves didn't interact. When the barriers were positioned in a way that did allow the waves to interact, I noticed the same thing as with 1 barrier: the wave just continued until it found where it could be "let out" and interact with the other wave.