This paper was submitted as an in-school practice "mini" Internal Assessment for the International Baccalaureate Physics Higher Level exams (May 2022).
The original submission and marked submission can be downloaded here, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
A capstan is a device which utilises the Capstan Effect to increase the loading force of a rope by wrapping it around a cylinder. It has led to a wide variety of applications, including windlasses, conveyor belts and rock-climbing equipment. Although the Capstan equation gives a good approximation of the relationship between the hold force and the load force, according to Gao et al., several assumptions such as the rope being non-elastic and non-rigid is often hard to be fulfilled. This paper attempts to assess the relationship between the wrap angle of a capstan and the loading force.
The raw Logger Pro files and images can be found under experiment.
The failed attempts and pilot study Logger Pro files and images can be found under experiment_dep.
The majority of the data processing is done with MS Excel: master.xlsx (I was not familiar with Python at that time).