Physics Help Forum Calculating period - Mass on a spring

 Kinematics and Dynamics Kinematics and Dynamics Physics Help Forum

 Oct 22nd 2017, 03:58 PM #1 Junior Member   Join Date: Oct 2017 Posts: 2 Calculating period - Mass on a spring Hello all, I am writing a lab report for physics and I am wondering if my calculations are valid. I am to calculate the period of a mass on a spring and then to find out how the changing of that mass affects the period. The original formula I am meant to use is 'T = n/t', the number of vibrations (oscillations in this case) divided by the time (seconds). Something went wrong during the experiment and so now when I put my results into the above formula, I do not get any sort of correlation. So I then turned to the formula for calculating the period for a mass on a spring - 'T = 2pi * square root of m/k'. Now I thought, if I want to solve for K, I can simply take the average of the 'n' and 't' and do the following - 7.3335/3.74 = 6.28 * square root of 50/k Where 7.3335 is the average oscillations and 3.74 is the average time. Now my question is, is this allowed? The reason why I thought this was allowed was that T = n/t, so why shouldn't n/t = 2pi * square root of m/k, as they are different ways to find the same thing? Correct? or am I wrong? Thank you!
 Oct 23rd 2017, 05:31 PM #2 Senior Member     Join Date: Aug 2008 Posts: 113 Looks like you are using the formula for frequency, the reciprocal of period. period = (total time for n oscillations)/n $T= \dfrac{t_{total}}{n}$
 Oct 24th 2017, 01:26 AM #3 Junior Member   Join Date: Oct 2017 Posts: 2 Sorry my bad, I meant t/n. But back to the question, is it possible to make them equal to each other? Are they both the exact same thing?

 Tags calculating, mass, period, spring

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