Using sound to do mechanics

Ananda Dasgupta

Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Kolkata

NPTEL workshop
The bouncing ball

When a ball is dropped onto a hard table it bounces.

I At each bounce, it loses speed
I The speeds at successive bounces are related by
vn+1 = rvn
where r (< 1) is the coefficient of restitution.
I The bounces get progressively closer together in time.
The bouncing ball - some math

If the ball is dropped from a height h:

I Its speed when it hits the ground for the first time is
√
v0 = 2gh
I Speed after the n-th bounce is vn = r n v0 .
I Time interval between the n-th and the n + 1-th bounce is
2vn 2v0
tn = = rn
g g

I Total time taken between the first bounce and the N-th is
s
N−1
X 2v0 r − r N 8h r − r N
TN = tn = =
g 1−r g 1−r
n=1
The bouncing ball - warmup experiment

You will need :

I Steel ball bearings
I A hard surface (glass table-top, tiled floor ...)
I A stopwatch - your mobile phone will do.
Procedure :
I Drop a ball bearing on to the hard surface from a measured
height h.
I Start the stop watch when you hear the ball hit the surface.
I Count the bounces (by the noise) till you reach a sufficiently
high number - say 10, and stop the stop watch.
I Repeat several times for the same height h.
I For better results, do the above for several values of h.
The bouncing ball - warmup experiment

Shortcomings :
I Human response time limits accuracy
I Counting bounces is tedious ...
I ... and errorprone.
I Does not allow you to verify the geometric progression of the
tn s.
I The value of g is an input!
The bouncing ball - a more detailed look

You will need :

I Steel ball bearings
I A hard surface (glass table-top, tiled floor ...)
I A Laptop/Desktop/Mobile phone with microphone
I Audio processing software (we will use Audacity)
Procedure :
I Drop a ball bearing on to the hard surface from a measured
height h.
I Record the sound
I Open the sound file in Audacity
I Zoom in to read off the times of the bounces
I You can get the times correct to a mili-second!
The bouncing ball - a more detailed look
A view of Audacity in action
The bouncing ball - a more detailed look
Audacity in action - zooming in
The bouncing ball - a more detailed look
Results

I The red dots are the time intervals between the bounces.
I The blue line is the best fit curve tn = a r n
I The best fit values are a = 0.483, r = 0.952
s
8h
I Since a = , we can use the above to determine the value
g
of g , which here comes out to be 10.33 ms−2 .
The bouncing ball - Analyzing the data

I tn = a r n =⇒ ln tn = ln a + n ln r
I Plot a graph of ln tn versus n.
I Draw the best fit straight line to this graph.
I Determine ln a and ln r as the intercept and the slope,
respectively, of this best fit line.
I Use this to calculate r and g .
Comparison

There are typically four methods cited in the literature for

measuring e :
I Measurement of vertical rebound
I Spark photography (today - high speed movie cameras and
tracker)
I Measurement of angle of rebound from an inclined plane
I Double ballistic pendulum method of Thomas
These methods are all difficult to perform accurately, and are often
expensive. Our method, in contrast, is cheap and quite accurate!