Inaccuracies and improvements

Through the design and execution of our experiments even though we have strived to reduce them as much as possible with our resources, there have still been situations where there have been some potential errors we are forced to recognize yet do not significantly impair the results of our project as a whole. The most representative for this are the measurement of the height of the water level and the accuracy of the shape and size of the orifice in the container.

One of the potential ways of improvement to the accuracy of our experiment was replacing the method of measurement for the height of the water level as it was somewhat awkward and inaccurate to measure it from the side due to the shape of our containers and the tools at our disposal and by measuring it within the container we somewhat disturb the accuracy of our experiment. As it wasn’t feasible for us to accurately grasp how much water we’ve put into the container and therefore wasn’t possible to calculate the water level this way, such collection of data was crucial for most of our experiments. Alternatively to improving the experiment itself we’ve instead ran more of the experiments to make up for the error as it was more resource efficient. Should a more precise version of our experiment be conducted with similar conditions we recommend using an tilted laser relative to the water level, moving down and observing the changes where the laser lands. When the size of the laser point is largest the light travels right through both water and the air above it and from that we can calculate the height of the water level with the angle of the laser and the relevant distance.

For the improvement in the shape and size of the orifice we recommend using another material such as glass or similar since it deforms significantly less upon the creation of an orifice and is overall more resistant to external influences while still enabling our previous method to give accurate result for the height of the water level. As for the check for the shape and size of orifice our method of taking a photograph with both the orifice and a referential object with known dimensions and calculating the diameter of the orifice should still be sufficient as long as the camera resolution is high enough.