2 fast..2 furious..

Almost all of the people use vehicles as their means of transportation. These vehicles ran on different surfaces. A group of researchersn (ther were four researchers who worked on this study and myself is included) from UP high school became interested on something. This something is the relationship between the surface on which a vehicle runs, and the acceleration of that vehicle as it runs. This led to research study entitled "Effects of Different Surfaces on the Acceleration of a Toy Car."


Our study aimed to determine the effects of different surfaces on tha acceleration of the vehicle. since we are poor, we could not afford to use a real car for our research, so we use a toy car instead. We ran the toy car (ten times) on six surfaces, namely: asphalt, wood, ngrass, ice, concrete and sand. To get its acceleration, we used the formula: a=(vf-vi)/t where a is acceleration, vf is the initial velocity, vi is the initial velocity, and t is time. We ran the toy car on a straight line five meters long. we recorded its motion by a video camera. The data were uploaded into the computer and were analyzed.

After the data was analyzed, it showed that the toy car accelerated fastest on concrete (1.475 m/s^2). its acceleration on asphalt and wood were 1.020 m/s^2 and 1.190 m/s^2, respectively. The toy car did not run on ice surface, wwsand surface, and grass surface because it did not gain wenough contact on the ground because it was so light. The computed F-ratio of 1029.467 is greater than the tabled value of 3.35, at p-.05 with (2.27) degrees of freedom, hence there is a significant difference. Wuth this, we rejected our null hypothesis. This means that there exists a significant difference in the accelerations of the toy car on different surfaces.

based on our results, the toy car accelerated fastest on concrete. wif we observe, the concrete has smoother surface, thus, concrete has lower capability of countering the motion of the toy car (I used the word "countering" because friction is always opposite the motion of an object). This shows that with lesser friction, the greater the acceleration (but when the friction between two objects are zero, it will not move at all).

Hopefully, our study can contribute new, if not, additional knowledge, regarding matters about friction.