Beer Froth Experiment
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Contents |
Introduction
Materials
- Non-alcoholic beer, or soda (coke, pepsi, etc...)
- Graduated cylinder
- Stopwatch
Data Taking
Data is best acquired in groups of 3. Declare one person as the timekeeper. Their role will be to call out time intervals of every 10 seconds. The other two will take note of both the upper and lower beer froth levels.
First, pour beer in the graduated cylinder. When using soda, you will notice that the decay will be much more rapid than that of beer. Once the cylinder is nearly full, start your measurements. Note that you will need to excercise your best guess to assign levels, since levels are not well defined. (Not an exact science? Well, this is a good point for discussion.) After a few minutes of data accumulation, you should analyze the data. See "Analysis."
It is advised to perform a trial run. However, do take data during trial runs as you will be exercising the entire machinery of data taking. Never discard any data, it is good information that will help you better understand the components of the experiment. Taking data takes skills. One easy way out is to make a video and play in slow motion, or stop frame. We have one movie that you can download (right click on windows machine, control click on apple). Do NOT click on the link. Use quicktime player on macs, or windows media player in windows.
Analysis
Download the document Analyzing data with Excel to learn how to use Microsoft Excel to analyze data. When looking at the distribution of the data, ask some important questions:
- What trends do you see in the data?
- If you were to graph it, what would it look like? Would it be linear?
- What relationship can you draw between time passed and the recorded levels?
- What are the differences between the upper and lower levels?
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