MEASURING THE COEFFICIENT OF RESTITUTION OF BALL-METAL SURFACE COMBINATION USING RC CIRCUIT

Abstract

This paper presents a simple method that allows the determination of the coefficient of restitution of ball-metal surface using RC circuit as a timer, a metre rule and graphical analysis. The experiment emphasizes on the simple model of free fall of vertical non-spinning motion of three different balls which leads to good results. The average values of the coefficient of restitution or loss of kinetic energy in ascending order are 0.3122, 0.6223 and 0.7818 for the rubber squash ball, plastic table tennis ball and rubber lawn tennis ball used in the experiment respectively.