Will Hot or Cold Temperatures Affect How High Tennis Balls Will Bounce?

Overview

Objectives/Goals My objective was to find out if hot or cold temperatures would affect how high tennis balls would bounce. Methods/Materials Materials included tennis balls, oven, freezer, camera, infrared thermometer and a robotic arm. I used 18 tennis balls, I froze 6 to -2 degrees, heated 6 to 200 degrees, and left 6 at room temperature (72 degrees) to use as a control. Using a robotic arm to release the balls at an exact time, I dropped them all from a height of 36 inches, one at a time, while documenting it on video. Using the infrared thermometer, I recorded the exact temperatures as they were dropped. Results The control balls bounced on average 26 inches. The cold balls bounced on average 13 inches and the hot balls bounced on average 28 inches. Hot and cold temperatures definitely affects how high the tennis balls would bounce. The hot balls bounced on average 5 inches higher than the control, and 15 inches higher than the cold balls. Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis was right. The hot balls did bounce higher than the cold balls. The hot balls bounced a little higher than the control balls, but much higher than the cold balls. The cold temperature really affected how high the tennis balls bounced.

Competition history

• CSEF 2015 Applied Mechanics & Structures · Entry J0329

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

• All Engineering projects
• CSEF Engineering projects
• Every CSEF 2015 project