Quote:
Originally Posted by Bob Jewett View Post
Yes, like a bell. If the ringing is fairly slow, like one cycle or less in the time the tip is in contact, a fair amount of energy can be lost in the tip-ball contact. If the ringing is a fairly high frequency, like many cycles in a millisecond, then not much energy goes into the ringing.
A 2mm-thick steel surface ought to have fairly high resonant frequency.
So the ball would oscillate like a bell and that could counteract some of the tip-ball energy? Cool. Would the same dynamic apply to ball-ball collisions?
pj
chgo
This is what I meant by the "trampoline effect", and how that would need to be eliminated. (also known as the Coefficient of Restitution, or COR value) If not, then the stored energy of an impact, be it from cue tip, or ball-ball, would be returned in a much different force than a standard elastic collision. This principle, the COR value, is used for baseball and softball bats, balls, golf clubs and balls, and I'm sure lots and lots of other similar sporting equipment. And while it would ideally need to be eliminated for a direct comparison to a solid cue ball, I sincerely doubt that woud be possible. Even a core of something super light, say carbon fiber, surrounded by the weight carrying layer, and then finally coated by the phenolic layer to match the surface characteristics of a "standard" cue ball (a moving target to be sure), would still have a different COR value than a standard cue, and that ringing, or resonance, or deflection, or whatever you'd call it, would change the dymanics of the experiment, at least as much as I'm interpreting it.