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.