4. Discussion

Following our data results, we found that the force recorded for the differently treated tiles indeed did decrease in force, per respective sandpaper treatment. However, up to the point where the tile was treated by the sandpaper for 120 seconds or more, the amount of frictional force showed little or no change. Sandpaper has tiny abrasive particles on its surface, which then saws off the surface of the applied material, thus making it smoother (Brooks, 2017). Therefore, after being used to treat the tile for a set duration, the sandpaper would eventually become less rough. Therefore we used new sandpaper sheets per different treatment. From our data, we can infer that the greater the duration a surface is being scrubbed with sandpaper, the smoother it becomes, which results in a lesser amount of friction on the surface. We conclude that the general trend of the graph resulted a decreasing trend, while the anomaly of the graph showed that the amount of frictional force eventually stopped decreasing after a set duration of being scrubbed by sandpaper for 120 seconds or more.

Sandpaper makes the respective surface smoother, therefore the floor tiles would be smoothed out, resulting in lesser resistive frictional force. We were sure to use one sandpaper sheet per respective tile treatment, and two sheets for the tiles being given a longer treatment duration. For example: Tile B, which is only being treated for 30 seconds, uses only one sandpaper sheet. Tile E, which is treated for 120 seconds, uses two sandpaper sheets. (1 sheet per 60 second treatment period such that the sandpaper sheets will not lose its roughness)

Our hypothesis was proven wrong as we initially thought that the sandpaper would roughen out the tiles and would eventually stop increasing but actually it had smoothen the tiles and stop after a while instead.

We could have used a sandpaper machine to help us scrub the tiles more easily instead but the school was not able to provide us with one thus we had to manually scrub it ourselves. If we had used the sandpaper machine to treat the tiles instead, the amount of force applied would have been greater, which would thus result in a different data set. When we were conducting our first experiment, we had different people scrubbing the tiles, thus there was a difference in the amount of force subjected. However, we realised that we could have reused the first 6 tiles in the repetition of the experiment to save time, but then we also realised that by doing so, the surfaces of the tiles would be slightly more rougher or smoother, since the set of weights had been dragged across the tile already, resulting in either an slightly increased or slightly decreased amount of frictional force of the surface of the tile.