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Double cone roller : Fizzics Education

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Double cone roller

Double cone roller

Follow FizzicsEd 150 Science Experiments:

You will need

  • 2 empty 1.5L soda bottles
  • 2 cork kitchen pot stands (1 cm thick)
  • 2 wooden chopsticks (27 cm long)
  • 2 takeaway containers
  • Sticky tape
  • 5 supermarket catalogues (app. 1mm thick ea.)
    Note: You can substitute them with other materials with similar lengths and thicknesses.
  • Optional: A protractor to measure the angles

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Two soft drink bottles, a cork pot stand, two chopsticks, catalogues, tape and plastic containers
1 A coca cola bottle being cut at the neck by scissors

Cut the soda bottles at the edge of their label.

2 Two halves of soda bottles taped together to form a double cone

Tape the conical parts o the soda bottle together.

3 25cm marked between plastic boxes

Place two takeaway containers upside down, about 26cm apart.

4 Setting up the stands, whereby two plastic boxes 26cm apart have materials on them (one has two pot stands and the other has two paper catalogues)

Put both of the pot stands on one container and two catalogues on the other (the number of catalogues or pot stands will vary dependent on the thickness of the at catalogues that you use)

5 Overhead view of the two angled ramps made by chopsticks. The distance between two ends of the chopsticks are 12cm whilst the other end the distance between the chopsticks are 6 cm.

Put the chopsticks on the pot stands and the catalogues in V shape. The ends on the pot stands are 12cm apart and the other ends are 6 cm apart. Fix them in place using sticky tape.

6 Looking at the angle of a ramp using a yellow triangle

Your chopstick ramp should now be at an angle (you could measure this with a protractor).

Now it’s time to try your double cone roller!

  • Carefully place the double cones on the lower side of the chopsticks.
  • Can your double cone roll uphill (or is this really an illusion)?

This may need several trials to make it roll, whereby you will need to alter the angle of the ramp by either changing the number of the catalogues or pot stands to modify the slope.

7 A man pointing at a bicycle wheel spinning horizontally on a desk (balancing by itself)

Get the Unit of Work on Forces here!

  • Push, pull
  • Friction & spin!

From inertia to centripetal force, this unit covers many concepts about Newton’s Laws!

Includes cross-curricular teaching ideas, student quizzes, a sample marking rubric, scope & sequences & more

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8 Pushing a balloon onto a nail chair
9 Teacher showing how to do an experiment outside to a group of kids.

Online courses for teachers & parents

– Help students learn how science really works

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What is going on?

The centre of mass will roll down the incline due to the gravitational force. In this case, the centre of mass is on the line connecting the centres of the coke caps (look at step 2). The conical shape allows the double cone to sink toward the wider end of the V-shape rails due to its centre of mass. Therefore, although its centre of mass is moving down, it creates an illusion that the double cone looks like it rolls uphill.

Variables to test

More on variables here

  • Does it matter if you have small or large soda bottles?
  • Vary the width of the ‘V-shape’ of the chopsticks.
  • Vary the angle of the chopstick ramps
  • What happens if you replace the chopsticks with another material?

A man with a glove above a liquid nitrogen vapour cloud

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