Determination of Centripetal Force and Gravitational Force Using Conical Pendulum: the Tethered Aeroplane

Abstract

This research emphasized on determining the string tension, the string tension of the radial component  or the centripetal force, and gravitational force (g) using conical pendulum with tethered aeroplane. When applying string length and airspeed, a stable, horizontal, circular orbit was quickly measured using a digital video (DV) camcorder with the Tracker software, an imaging analysis program, for analyzing the aeroplane’s motion. The string lengths were varied from 90 cm to 130 cm. The experimental results found that the air speeds were varied from 185 cm s^-1 to 322 cm s^-1. The string tension and the centripetal force were varied from 0.657 N to 0.862 N and 0.346 N to 0.656 N, respectively. The experimental values of path radii provide a good agreement between theoretical values and experimental results, found that the error is less than ±2%. Finally, the gravitational forces (g) were between 9.628 ms^-2 to 9.948 ms^-2 which experimental results are in good agreement with the standard value with an error of less than ±2%