Overview: For our class, we were instructed to make a video about the physics of a sport that we chose. We chose water bottle flipping. While it is technically not a sport, it is still a very popular thing for students to do on campus and we wanted to break down the physics of it. We hoped that in doing this, we could help not only ourselves, but our peers in becoming the best water bottle flippers they can be. Everyone, even us, thought at the beginning of this whole thing that ours was going to end up being a big joke. It actually ended up being, what our group thought, to be one of the most interesting "sports" videos.
The Scientific Concepts: Acceleration - "Increase in the rate or speed of something. Acceleration equals Velocity divided by Time. In our project, the water bottle accelerated at 9.8 m/s due to gravity."
Force - "Strength or energy as an attribute of physical action or movement." Force equals Mass times Acceleration. The ideal force exerted 19 newtons (or 4 pounds) during water bottle flipping."
Force of Impact - "Even though the application of conservation of energy to a falling object allows us to predict its impact velocity and kinetic energy, we cannot predict its impact force without knowing how far it travels after impact. If an object of mass m= kg is dropped from height. h = m, then the velocity just before impact is."
Center of Gravity - "A point from which the weight of a body or system may be considered to act. In uniform gravity it is the same as the center of mass."
Horizontal Velocity - "Horizontal velocity is the rate at which an object is traveling parallel to the earth. Horizontal Velocity equals Distance divided by Time. In water bottle flipping, the person flipping the bottle should try to decrease the amount of horizontal velocity as much as they can, having none would be the best. However, that' s essentially impossible. In our case, the bottle moved horizontally about 12 cm or .12 m" Angular Momentum -" It is the rotational analog of linear momentum. It is an important quantity in physics because it is a conserved quantity – the angular momentum of a system remains constant unless acted on by an external torque."
There are no horizontal components to our "sport".
Vertical Velocity - "Vertical velocity is velocity in a vertical direction, which means it is always affected by acceleration due to gravity. Velocity equals Acceleration times Time. The vertical velocity of the water bottle flip in our example is 3.4 m/s or 7.6 m/hr."
Reflection: This was a really fun project to work on. There was a lot more to water bottle flipping than I had originally thought. Our whole group had a fun time doing it, we all had great chemistry. It was a bit tricky at times though to stay on task and not get distracted with talking to each other. In the future though, I will try harder to stay on task more and make the best use of my time. None of it could've happened though without our great teammate Kelsey. She took the liberty of working on the project at her house so it could be the best possible outcome. Overall it was a great experience and we all learned a lot from doing it.