Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Buoys


May 15, 2012
Hypothesis- waves will be highest in the middle of Pacific Ocean.

I looked at several buoys in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Arabian Sea near India, the Atlantic Ocean off the cost of African, and the North Sea.  The highest wave I saw was in the Pacific Ocean and the lowest was off the coast of Africa.  I think wind pushing the water towards land makes the waves high.   There were many different types of buoys.  I saw a disc buoy, Oil Platform.  The most interesting one was on an oil platform in the North Sea.  The wind speed at that location (59.500 N 1.500 E (59°30'0" N 1°30'0" E) was 17.1 knots.  I think wind and weather patterns cause waves to become high or low.  Buoys are helpful to meteorologists because they collect data to help predict the weather at sea.   Buoys collect different data for many purposes like to know wave highest.  Boaters use buoys to tell if it is a good time to go fishing or not.  Buoys on the coast can help alter cities of possible tsunamis. In conclusion I believe that my hypothesis was correct based on the data I found. 


Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Making Waves lab & Simulation


Hypothesis - I believe that if you use a pipette to drop a drip of water into a pen, the water will ripple.

Observation - For the last two or three science classes, we have been learning about water wave in general.  So last class we used a simulation about the interactions of waves. You can drop drops of water in the simulation and it makes waves.   You and increase or decrease that amount of water dropped at a time and look at the different types of wave patterns.  What I noticed during the time I experimented with the simulation was that when you and a lower frequency of drops, the waves would be bigger and there would not be many of them.  When you had a high frequency, there are a lot of waves but they are very small.  I also noticed that the bigger the drop the higher the wave.

Making Waves lab
Analysis - Over two science class periods, we did a lab about making waves. During this lab, we actually made waves by dropping water into a pan of water using a pipette.  We did several experiments like dropping the drops in different corners of the pan and observing the different wave patterns.  We also put clay in the middle of the pans and then dropped drops of water into the pan to see what would happen.  What actually happened is that the clay acted like wall and the drops of water bounced of the clay.  Another thing we did was to put a paper towel on the side of the pan laying on top of the water.  Then we dropped a drop of water into the center of the pan to see what would happen.  What did happen was that the wave created by the drop continued underneath the paper towel.  The last experiment we tried was redoing all of our previous wave experiments but adding a cork into the pan.  What my partner and I noticed was that the cork didn’t change anything and all the experiments had the same result as they had without the cork previously.  

In my data I saw that the waves bounced off the edges of the pan and then faded away.  I also observed that the higher you dropped a drip, the greater the wave reaction it would cause.  This demonstrated that there is a relationship between the height at which a drip is dropped and the size of the wave created.






Conclusion – The behavior of waves is dependent on many different things.  In the situations we experimented with there is always a wave reaction creating a ripple effect on the surface of the water.  After doing this lab, I can now answer two of the three guiding questions.  Waves created by dropping water from a pipette into a pan of water create ripples on the water in a circular shape moving outward.  Waves interact with each other and solid objects by reversing direction.   I am not certain what properties a mechanical wave has.