Related papers: Frictionless Racquetball?
A ball dropped from a given height onto a surface, will bounce repeatedly before coming to rest. A ball bouncing on a thick plate will behave very differently than a ball bouncing off the thin lid of a container. For a plate with a fixed…
Inspired by the turf-ball interaction in golf, this paper seeks to understand the bounce of a ball that can be modelled as a rigid sphere and the surface as supplying an elasto-plastic contact force in addition to Coulomb friction. A…
In the problem of cylinder rolling without slipping on a horizontal floor, both the cylinder and floor are generally treated as rigid bodies in normal textbooks. When the air resistance is ignored, the equation of motion has a solution with…
A detailed set of experiments are described that capture over a 1000 different instances of the bounce of a golf ball. Video analysis is used to capture velocity and spin immediately prior to and subsequent to each bounce for a wide variety…
We study the collision dynamics of a spinning cue ball approaching a static object ball with equal mass on a plane, common in billiards. While typical collisions in billiards are nearly perfectly elastic, with a restitution coefficient…
This article illustrates the role of friction on the motion of a rolling sphere on pedagogical example. We use a parabolic support rotating around it axis to study the static equilibrium positions of a single sphere. Due to the particular…
The resistance against rolling of a rigid cylinder on a flat viscous surface is investigated. We found that the rolling-friction coefficient reveals strongly non-linear dependence on the cylinder's velocity. For low velocity the…
We show that the friction force and torque, acting at a dry contact of two objects moving and rotating relative to each other, are inherently coupled. As a simple test system, a sliding and spinning disk on a horizontal flat surface is…
The dynamic frictional force between solid surfaces in relative motion differs from the static force needed to initiate motion, but this distinction is not usually thought to occur for liquid drops moving on a solid. Recent experiments…
In this paper, we consider the dynamics of a heavy homogeneous ball moving under the influence of dry friction on a fixed horizontal plane. We assume the ball to slide without rolling. We demonstrate that the plane may be divided into two…
We present a field theoretic model for friction, where the friction coefficient between two surfaces may be calculated based on elastic properties of the surfaces. We assume that the geometry of contact surface is not unusual. We verify…
Prior research suggests that many students believe that the magnitude of the static frictional force is always equal to its maximum value. Here, we examine introductory students' ability to learn from analogical reasoning (with different…
The coefficient of restitution $\epsilon$ characterizes the energy retained when a ball bounces, and can easily be measured in an ``at home'' experiment. For thin-walled gas-filled balls such as basketballs, we construct a simple two…
A bouncing rubber ball under a motion sensor is a classic of introductory physics labs. It is often used to measure the acceleration due to gravity, and can also demonstrate conservation of energy. By observing that the ball rises to a…
A particle is thrown tangentially on a surface. It is shown that for some surfaces and for special initial velocities the thrown particle leaves immediately the surface, and for special conditions it never leaves the surface. The conditions…
When a free falling ping-pong ball collides on a horizontal surface, it loses kinetic energy. The ratio between the height reached by the ball after the collision and the initial height is called restitution coefficient. A method to measure…
In the classroom demonstration of a tennis ball dropped on top of a basketball, the surprisingly high bounce of the tennis ball is typically explained using momentum conservation for elastic collisions, with the basketball-floor collision…
Several scenarios used in teaching feature a rolling motion with slipping that transitions to one without through friction with the ground. We summarise these transitions by introducing an unknown impulse that is transferred to the ground.…
When a falling ball chain strikes a surface, a tension is created that pulls the chain downward. This causes a downward acceleration that is larger than free-fall, which has been observed by recent experiments. Here a theoretical…
We study a simple model of a bouncing ball that takes explicitely into account the elastic deformability of the body and the energy dissipation due to internal friction. We show that this model is not subject to the problem of inelastic…