How High A Ball Bounces Lab Report

Bouncing

Introduction:

A rubber ball is very interesting due to its unique properties that help it bounce very high. rubber balls are made of elastic material such as rubber which affect the ball when bouncing. The materials that a ball bounces on also greatly affect how high the ball bounces leading me to thinking about how some materials would affect and what type of materials would allow the ball to reach a maximum height. This experiment will be investigating the effect of the surface material such as glass, wood, and marble, on the maximum height the ball can reach. I choose the rubber ball due to its great elasticity allowing me to observe the difference in the materials effect on the ball easier. According to the law of conservation

Marble was 69.76% efficient and wood was 61.34% and glass was 49.00% efficient this shows how marble conserves much more energy whitch increases the rebound height of the ball. The data shows both marble and wood are close to each other in terms of the rebound heights of the balls but on the other hand the results for the glass was very far from the results for wood and marble showing that wood absorbs more energy from the falling ball resulting in the rebound height being less than the marble but what was unexpected was for the glass to have a less rebound height than the wood. The data also shows that there is some random error which might be due to manually dropping the ball. the coefficient of restitution for marble is 0.8289, for wood 0.7832 and for glass is 0.7000 this expresses the elasticity of each material showing that marble conserved the most amount of energy during the collision allowing which allowed for the highest rebound

I can also try using pure wood that was not painted, paint might affect the results due to it being a different material. As the thickness of each surface was not consistent, this may have influenced the results so to obtain more precise measurements the surfaces should have the same thickness. The temperature of marble was cooler than other surfaces which might have created systematic error in the results to solve this all materials used should be at the same temperature.

Resources: “Coefficient of Restitution.” Topend Sports, https://www.topendsports.com/biomechanics/coefficient-of-restitution.htm.

Helmenstine, Anne. “Why a Glass Ball Bounces Higher than a Rubber Ball.” Science Notes and Projects, 2 May 2021, https://sciencenotes.org/why-a-glass-ball-bounces-higher-than-a-rubber-ball/.

Grainger Engineering Office of Marketing and Communications. “Bouncing Glass Balls.” Physics Van | UIUC,