Pendulum Motion Analysis

For the first part of the motion in this video, Cam’s body is moving on the swing in simple harmonic motion. Therefore, the system can be treated as a simple pendulum, with the swing having a length of 2.197 meters.  From the analysis of the y-position vs time graph for the time while on the swing, the amplitude drawn from the data is 0.67135 meters. Furthermore, the angular frequency drawn from this system is equal to the square root of gravity over the length, giving us an angular frequency of 0.473 radians/second. Cam’s body leaves the swing at the leftmost point in the swing’s motion, which is equal to half of the swing’s period. Cam leaves the swing at time t=1.235 seconds, so this provides that the swing’s total period is 2.47 seconds long. Since frequency is the inverse of the swing’s period, this leads us to obtain a frequency for the system of 0.405 Hz. Similarly, if angular frequency is multiplied by 2  the value for frequency is .337 Hz and the period found by the inverse of frequency is 2.972. Since the theoretical and the observed values for frequency and period are very close it shows the accuracy of our lab. With percent errors of 20.2% and 16.8% it is easy to see that the data was quite accurate.