HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.
Dropping a water-filled cup with a ping-pong ball inside to the ground expels the ball much higher than its initial height. During free fall, the absence of gravity in the reference frame of the cup makes capillary forces dominant, causing the ball to be sucked into water. At impact, the high velocity ejection is due to the strong Archimedes’ force caused by vertical acceleration. In this paper, we study the dynamics of the capillary sinking of the ball during free fall and the ejection speed at impact, using tracking and high-speed imaging. In particular, we show that at short-time, the sinking is governed by capillary and added mass forces.
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