Drop Height Experiment

It was hypothesised that as the drop height increases, the bounce height of all the balls will also increase. This is because the increasing drop height will result in an increase in the gravitational potential energy found within the balls that results in an increased transformation into kinetic will transform back into kinetic energy on the rebound; the by-product of which is a greater bounce height. The hypothesis was supported by the results. The results showed a clear trend where a steady increase of the drop height resulted in a rise in the bounce height of the ball.
The data in Table 2 showed that the bounce efficiency for each ball was predominantly consistent throughout the tests, but the ping pong ball showed a steady decrease in
Since each ball was going at a high speed when it reached the peak of its bounce it is hard to measure how high the ball had bounced on sight alone. Parallax errors were hard to avoid during this experiment as each bounce was a different height and the camera moved during filming. To improve the reliability of results the experiments could be filmed with high speed video camera which would capture more shots per second than an ordinary camera, allowing the footage to be analysed down to the most accurate shot taken at the highest point of the bounce. Another thing that would improve the accuracy of the results would be to have a tripod set up for the camera so that the movement of the camera would not affect the measurement of the ball height for example, if the camera was being held on an angle. Our experiment aimed to have one group member consistently drop the balls throughout all testing to eliminate another variable from the testing, but the group member was not available for final testing so a substitute was used on the final day of experimenting. The reliability of results could also have been improved by conducting the test in an enclosed space so that weather conditions such as wind or rain did not influence how the ball fell. The experiment was also tested over the course of a few weeks. This means that the setup of the experiment may have varied slightly or different