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.
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. 
