Coefficient of Friction

To determine the coefficient of friction ? for various materials in dry sliding contact.

The Practical Project report is to be used to express in a written form the purpose, methods employed, results obtained and conclusions reached in your experiment. It should be very neat, concise and complete. It should be prepared using a word processor for the text, spreadsheet software for tables, and graphing software for graphs (MS Word and Excel would be sufficient).

The report should be clearly identified with a cover page (1) including the following; the Practical No. and title, your name and student number, course name and course code, the date the experiment was performed and the tutor's name, Contents Page (2) and (3) an abstract. The abstract should be a very brief overview of the goals and the main results of the experiment. If a known physical quantity was measured in the experiment then you should state the numerical value of the result that you obtained for that quantity and also state how close your result was to the expected result. It would be a good practice to write the abstract last, after you have written the remainder of the experiment. The Abstract must be no more than one page in length.

In a section entitled Description of Experiment (4) you should describe the purpose of the experiment, the principles that are studied, and the procedures that were employed to complete the experiment. It is not necessary (in fact it is undesirable) to give a step-by-step account of your activities in the experiment. Rather you should summarize the main techniques that you used to get to your final result. It may be helpful to include a sketch of the experimental geometry (i.e. setup/diagram of apparatus-properly labelled) (5). This can be done by hand or can be cut and pasted into your report.

You must have a section entitled Data and Analysis (6) in which you list and describe the raw experimental data collected during the experiment. Include any tables, graphs, results of best fits etc. as is appropriate. Describe how quantities were calculated from your raw data. If it is necessary to show a formula employed during the experiment then you may simply leave some space and write the equation in by hand (or you can use Microsoft Equation Editor to make your report look professional and attract more marks).

You should have a section entitled Results (7) in which you state the main result(s) of the experiment and compare your result(s) to the accepted or theoretical