Related papers: A Supersonic Ping Pong Gun
A vacuum-powered device that shoots ping pong balls at high subsonic speeds has been used for physics demonstrations for more than a decade. It uses physics that are easily understood by students, even though its operation is not…
Understanding how sound propagates through different media is fundamental to both science and technology. While sound plays a critical role in natural navigation and underlies a wide range of applications - from medical ultrasound to sonar…
This paper provides a simplified explanation of the vacuum bazooka through diagrams and builds a theoretical model only using concepts found in introductory mechanics. Our theory suggests that the velocity of the projectile is proportional…
The course "Phy Ex" was created by Yves Couder in the Paris VII university to teach experimental physics through projects. In this article, we present this teaching method through a particular project that took place in the autumn semester…
The influence of a supersonic projectile on a three-dimensional complex plasma is studied. Micron sized particles in a low-temperature plasma formed a large undisturbed system in the new 'Zyflex' chamber during microgravity conditions. A…
We introduce a new high resolution, high frame rate stereo video dataset, which we call SPIN, for tracking and action recognition in the game of ping pong. The corpus consists of ping pong play with three main annotation streams that can be…
We describe a pulsed rotating supersonic beam source, evolved from an ancestral device [M. Gupta and D. Herschbach, J. Phys. Chem. A 105, 1626 (2001)]. The beam emerges from a nozzle near the tip of a hollow rotor which can be spun at…
A basketball bounced on a stiff surface produces a characteristic loud thump, followed by high-pitched ringing. Describing the ball as an inextensible but flexible membrane containing compressed air, I formulate an approximate theory of the…
This article describes a simple method for using a PC soundcard to accurately measure bullet velocity. The method involves placing the microphone within a foot of the muzzle and firing at a steel target between 50 and 100 yards away. The…
Pulsars have mean space velocities >~500 km/s. The consequent ram pressure results in tight confinement of the star's energetic wind, driving a bow shock into the surrounding medium. Pulsar bow shocks have long been regarded as a curiosity,…
Considering the 21st century skills and the importance of STEM education in fulfilling these skills, it is clear that the course materials should be materials that bring students together with technology and attract their attention, apart…
The first laboratory astrophysics experiments to produce a radiatively cooled plasma jet with dynamically significant angular momentum are discussed. A new configuration of wire array z-pinch, the twisted conical wire array, is used to…
Learning to control high-speed objects in dynamic environments represents a fundamental challenge in robotics. Table tennis serves as an ideal testbed for advancing robotic capabilities in dynamic environments. This task presents two…
Relatively inexpensive and readily commercially available equipment (such as digital recorders, MP3 portable speakers and tie-pin microphones), allowed a team of students from McNeese State University to measure the speed of sound in the…
This article describes two acoustic methods to measure bullet velocity with an accuracy of 1% or better. In one method, a microphone is placed within 0.1 m of the gun muzzle and a bullet is fired at a steel target 45 m away. The bullet's…
A pneumatic gun for ballistic delivery of microparticles to soft targets is proposed and demonstrated. The particles are accelerated by a high speed flow of Helium in a capillary tube. Vacuum suction applied to a concentric, larger diameter…
We present a robotic table tennis platform that achieves a variety of hit styles and ball-spins with high precision, power, and consistency. This is enabled by a custom lightweight, high-torque, low rotor inertia, five degree-of-freedom arm…
We report experimental results on the parameters, structure, and evolution of high-Mach-number (M) argon plasma jets formed and launched by a pulsed-power-driven railgun. The nominal initial average jet parameters in the data set analyzed…
A classic problem of the motion of a projectile thrown at an angle to the horizon in a medium with a quadratic resistance law is studied. An approximate analytical solution of the equations of projectile motion is presented, which has a…
We report an emergence of bifurcation in basketball, a single-particle system governed by Newtonian mechanics. When shooting the basketball, the obvious control parameters are the launch speed and the launch angle. We propose to use the…