Momentum Snow Day Blog

Over break, I spent my snow day learning the physics behind the game pool. I did this by analyzing the collision of two pool balls. I analyzed the collision by setting up two pool balls in the background to mark one metter. Then my dad recorded me applying a force to the first ball to hit the second ball at rest propelling it. By doing this I was transferring momentum and initiating some movement in the second ball while the first one came to a stop.

I then put the video into logger pro. First I used the two balls I set up in the background that measure 1 meter and used that distance to scale. Then I started to collect my points from the yellow ball, the one that was hit (mass 2). I used Logger pro to collect the velocity of the second pool ball throughout the collision.

This graph shows the velocity of the second ball in the x direction.

*The second ball reaches 0.486 m/s after being struck by the first ball*

This graph shows the x velocity of the First ball before making contact with the second ball at rest.

*right before making contact with the second ball the frist ball reached 9.75 m/s before then coming to a rest after the collision*

With these values and knowing the weight of the mass I was able to use this to calculate values of both final velocities. I used the wright of each mass (1.6 grams) and the initial velocities found and solved for the final velocities of each of the balls.

Using this equation I found the final velocity of the second ball that was hit to be 1.77 m/s and the final velocity of the first ball to be 5.508 m/s. So these were a little off from the findings using loger pro. Error could have been made when plotting points in order to find the initial velocties using logger pro so the initial velocities could have been off which would explain the error in the calculations of the final velocities.

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