Submitted By
Ken San Nicolas I.D. #26
With Partners
Alan Chu and Cathy Manlapaz
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for
NS 101 Natural Science
Submitted to
Dr. Tseng
Fall 2007
Purpose: To accurately measure the circumference, height and volume of cylinders.
Apparatus: The items used for this experiment are
1) Pencil
2) Calculator
3) Three copper cylinders
4) A Vernier Caliper
Procedure: The intent is to measure the height and width of each brass weight so that the volume of the weight itself can be calculated. This goal can be achieved by using the Vernier Caliper to measure the irregular shape of the weight.
The caliper works as follows:
Close the jaws lightly on the object to be measured.
If you are measuring something with a round cross section, make sure that the axis of the object is perpendicular to the caliper. This is necessary to ensure that you are measuring the full diameter and not merely a chord.
Ignore the top scale, which is calibrated in inches.
Use the bottom scale, which is in metric units.
Notice that there is a fixed scale and a sliding scale.
The boldface numbers on the fixed scale are centimeters.
The tick marks on the fixed scale between the boldface numbers are millimeters.
There are ten tick marks on the sliding scale. The left-most tick mark on the sliding scale will let you read from the fixed scale the number of whole millimeters that the jaws are opened.
In the example above, the leftmost tick mark on the sliding scale is between 21 mm and 22 mm, so the number of whole millimeters is 21.
Next we find the tenths of millimeters. Notice that the ten tick marks on the sliding scale are the same width as nine ticks marks on the fixed scale. This means that at most one of the tick marks on the sliding scale will align with a tick mark on the fixed scale; the others will miss.
The number of the aligned tick mark on