Bouncing Ball Experiment

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Bouncing Ball Experiment

Our simple experiment is to drop a ping pong ball weighed at 3 grams

from a height of 1 metre then 90cm, 80cm, 70cm, 60cm, 50cm, 40cm and

of course zero cm. From dropping the ball we can see how high the ball

will bounce to after having a loss or gain of energy due to sound or

movement of the ball as it hits a hard surface. I will drop the ball 3

times altogether, on the second bounce I will look specifically at the

point it is likely to bounce to so the results will be more accurate.

After doing this three times I will then take an average to make it

more accurate. This will then even out any freak results, which occur.

While completing the experiment I will be taking note of the bounce

height of the ping-pong ball in a table of results. I will also make a

table of results for the amount of energy lost/gained.

We are trying to find out what will happen to the energy at potential

and kinetic points in the ball's bounce. We will be investigating what

type of energy is lost or gained, and whether or not a factor that is

changed in the investigation affects the results such as a change of

surface. Prior to this investigation we did preliminary work on a

computer program where you pressed go on the computer so that it

dropped the ball and it would automatically stop at the highest point

of its bounce. You could select the measurement you dropped the ball

from and it gave very accurate results.

Diagram

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Hypothesis

I predict when doing this experiment that the higher we drop the ball

from, the higher the ball will bounce to, because more potential

energy is gained from a greater height and therefore it will have more

kinetic energy at the surface and may bounce higher but energy is

still lost to heat, movement, sound and speed, therefore the ball will

never reach its original height that it was dropped from, when no

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