SMART FUN in MIRABILANDIA Report by: Ms. Giada Almici - Ms. Martina Sigalini

This is a summary of activities made by a group of italian students on April the 18th: our class is 2^B of IISS “ CAMILLO GOLGI “ in Brescia, Italy. Our team (22 students) has gone to an italian amusement park located in Savio, near Ravenna. We should get a data collection regarding acceleration on two rides, Discovery Tower and iSpeed Roller Coaster, but a few days before our visit the direction of the Park didn’t allowed us to go up with smartphones on coaster. Sparkvue (iOS device) and Physics Toolbox Roller Coaster (Android device) software installed on our smartphones have been used to measure acceleration, Excel spreadsheet for analysis. !DISCOVERY TOWER The ride consists of a turbo drop tower whose height is 52 meters above sea level. It launches its riders up and downwards with a power greater than normal gravity. Here following some pictures of us before the experiment. We put our phone in the housing arm and began recording data before closing safety handle. The cart has been raised almost at a

constant speed up to the top of ride, then was a c c e l e r a t e d downward and finally jumps up and down many times. We attached 8 csv or txt files showing the properties of motion described above: unfortunately 3 are corrupted and we found a failure of Vieyra software barometer (i.e. Physics Toolbox), as you can see in the chart shown on the next page (i.e. Figure 1); consider that we converted pressure in altitude Δh with the following formula (p in hPa): " !!

Δh = 8,33⋅ pmax − pmin( )

SMART FUN in MIRABILANDIA Report by: Ms. Giada Almici - Ms. Martina Sigalini

However (g-t) plot above shows quite clearly (Figure 2): A) The arrival on top of the tower. B) The downwards motion, during which apparent weight decreases: what a great emotion feeling lighter. As explained by our teacher the accelerometer measures the apparent weight, that is the elastic reaction to the gravitational. So, calling a the acceleration of the cart we have:

"

C) Upwards acceleration of ride: inertia forces applied to sismic mass of sensor evolve that is recorded in addition to the weight, making us feel heavier: so " .

ay = g − a

ay = g + a

upwards

downwards