Physics Project

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Conservation of Energy

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It may be
transformed from one form to another form, but the total energy of an isolated system remains
constant. To prove the law of conservation of energy or to study the energy conversion in a roller
coaster/skate ramp I designed an experiment using the PHET skate park simulation. First I built the
skate ramp, I decided to add loops and twists to get varying heights and thus varying levels of all
energies at play. Next I set all the settings to show the bar and pie charts so that data collection was
more efficient.

The experiment:

The independent variable: the position of the skater

The dependant variable: the amount of different energies the skater has
The constant: mass, friction, total amount of energy

We see that in picture 1 the skater has only potential energy, and thus the P.E. is equal to the total
energy. Picture 2, taken once the skater reached the bottom of the first ramp, shows that the skater has
“lost” the P.E., but actually it has just been converted to Kinetic Energy (K.E.) and Thermal Energy
(due to friction). In the following pictures (pictures 3 & 4), we observe the same phenomena. In all the
bar graphs we see that the total amount of energy is the same, that is there is no new energy being
created nor destroyed, even though the amounts of the different types of energy vary. Thus the law of
conservation of energy, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It may be transformed from one
form to another form, but the total energy of an isolated system remains constant.” is proved.

Picture 1 Picture 2

Picture 3 Picture 4