DERIVATION AND EXPERIMENTAL VERIFICATION OF CORIOLIS ACCELERATION BASED ON SMARTPHONES

An experimental apparatus was designed utilizing commonly available university laboratory equipment and a smartphone, aiming to achieve both visualization and quantitative measurement of Coriolis acceleration, thereby verifying its theoretical relationship. In this setup, a smartphone was fixed onto a rotating turntable to serve as a non-inertial reference frame. The smartphone captured the motion of a light spot that moved uniformly in a straight line within the ground-based inertial frame, while a photogate was employed to measure the speed of this uniform linear motion. By processing the videos recorded by the smartphone with Tracker video analysis software, the precise trajectory of the light spot in the non-inertial frame was plotted, which visually demonstrated the Coriolis force phenomenon. Furthermore, physical quantities such as the velocity and acceleration of the particle at various time instants were extracted from the trajectory. The experimentally measured acceleration was then compared with the theoretical value calculated from the Coriolis acceleration formula 2ω×v', where ω denotes the angular velocity of the turntable and v' represents the velocity of the light spot in the inertial frame. The experimental data showed excellent agreement with the theoretical calculations, thus quantitatively verifying the Coriolis acceleration relationship.