References

Video of original explained phenomenom taken from the website YouTube.com, by the user Theme Park Reviews.

Information of how the roller coaster loop works from the website www.physicsclassroom.com as well as www.loc.gov

Photo of explained phenomenon taken from www.howstuffworks.com

Group Members

Ng Yu Zhe (1427A)
Norman Phang (1427A)
Likitha Raghavendra (1427A)
Nur Hanna Maria D/O Mohamed R (1427A)

Write Up

So, the phenomenon that we are researching and writing up about is the idea behind why a roller coaster does not fall off even if they are upside down in a roller coaster track. The main reason for why this happens is because of energy changes as well as inertia. The energy change from gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy allows the acceleration of the roller coaster to increase a lot, thus allowing the roller coaster to move more quickly as well as moving along the roller coaster track. The high acceleration allows the roller coaster to gain enough momentum for it to go along the loop of the track, and not fall off the track as the acceleration caused by the change of gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy is more than the gravity that is pulling down on the roller coaster (-9.81ms-1). The reason to why this happens is because of inertia, where it is when an object resists a change in it’s motion, and continues to move in the direction that it was moving in in the first place. This was stated by Newton’s first law of motion. Due to this idea, it can be determined that inertia is the reason to why people stay in the roller coaster, as acceleration of the roller coaster is the motion, whereas the roller coaster is the object, and the roller coaster still continues to move in the straight line, thus proving that.

From howstuffworks "How roller coaster works"

Our video

This is our video explaining how a roller coaster loop works.

YouTube video explaining the phenomenon

This is a video by Youtube channel James Dann, where he explains using numbers how a roller coaster loop works.