Inelastic Collisions

Each of these four video clips shows one moving cart colliding with a stationary cart.
Using DataPoint, you will need to mark one of the carts, copy and paste that data into a
spreadsheet, then go back to DataPoint, mark the other cart, and paste that data into the
spreadsheet next to the first carts data.
Make sure that the times for each carts marks correspond to the others.
The y values have no use in any of these clips and may be deleted from the spreadsheet since
all motion is horizontal.
It is probably best to position your origin at the leftmost position marked.
The meter stick in the foreground should be used for scaling.
Once you have positions marked for each cart, a position-time plot may be made.
Slopes of each line segment may be used to obtain each carts velocity before and after the
collision.
Data in the spreadsheet should be manipulated in order to determine velocities.
Velocity-time graphs for each cart should also prove interesting.
Once the velocities of each cart are known, it is easy to make kinetic energy (KE = 0.5mv2)
and momentum (p = mv) calculations.
For collisions, we always want to compare the total momentum and total kinetic energy
before the collision with the totals after the collision. These sums can be easily computed
using the spreadsheet.
Momentum is conserved in both elastic and inelastic collisions; kinetic energy is only
conserved in elastic collisions. Therefore, the total momentum before the collision should be
equal to the total momentum after the collision, but the total kinetic energy after the collision
should be less than the total kinetic energy before the collision.