Experimentation on recurrent sphere collision with Audacity

Abstract

Under the theme of collisions that occur repeatedly, we conducted easy and inexpensive experiments of rebounding spheres and Newton’s cradle with two spheres to determine the coefficients of restitution using the sound record feature in modern laptops and a free and open source software called Audacity. In the rebounding sphere experiment, the coefficients of restitution of the golf and ping pong balls used were found to be 0.727 ± 0.025 and 0.816 ± 0.041 respectively. With the Netwon’s cradle experiment, the coefficient of restitution of two steel sphere balls was found to be 0.987 ± 0.003. The contrasts in the results obtained from both experiments permit the operational principles of a pendulum to be emphasized, and engagements to be made to consider the transfer of kinetic energy in the form of vibrational energy of the bodies’ constituents. Using a one-dimensional two-mass model with spring and damper linkages to account for harmonic motions that occur during impact, we found it possible to perform a simple analysis to account for this, and how it can be linked to high energy transfer modes such as the phenomenon of resonance and impedance matching.

Measuring the coefficient of restitution and more: a simple experiment to promote students’ critical thinking and autonomous work

“…The work proposed in this paper starts with a simple method to study the dependence of the coefficient of restitution, e, of different materials by listening to the noise made by bouncing balls using only a ball, a metre stick and a smartphone, in what, thus, can be an easy to do 'at home' experiment. Measuring e for different materials using balls is an usual teaching activity that has been discussed in different works [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]. The method described here has less exper imental difficulty than required in other methods [4,6,8,13,14], which reduces possible sources of experimental error and also allows students to measure smaller values of e. In addition, the method described here requires less numerical analysis than other previous methods [8], what makes it suitable for students with lower mathematical skills.…”

Measurement of Kinetic Friction Coefficient through Magnetic Induction Using Audacity Application in Physics Learning

“…The output of the recording using Audacity is in the form of audio files, either .wav, .aiff or .mp3 [9]. Audacity also functions to analyze the frequency of the recorded signal, search for the largest frequency record and record/detect EMF (Electromagnetic Field) signals [14][15][16][17][18]. Many experiments the data of which can be collected using Audacity, such as measuring Earth's gravitational acceleration [14], studying the Doppler effect [10], measuring the speed of sound [13], comparing the effects of factors in electromagnetic induction [15], experimenting resonance tube [11], and so on.…”