ERIC Number: EJ1306722
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2021-Jul
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0031-9120
EISSN: N/A
Available Date: N/A
Video Analysis of the Fall and Vertical Downward Launch of Styrofoam Balls with Air Drag
Physics Education, v56 n4 Article 045005 Jul 2021
The drag effect on a falling ball caused by air is a conventional subject in the most well-known textbooks of classical mechanics and fluid dynamics. Further, there are some papers that employ video analysis to track objects movements in the air making it possible to obtain position data as a function of time and its graphs. However, none of them addresses the case of a ball thrown downwards, maybe because this situation is neglected by textbooks or probably due to the experimental difficulty to perform this kind of launch manually. In this paper, both the fall and the vertical launch down of five different Styrofoam balls are filmed with an ordinary smartphone camera and analysed by using the free software Tracker. The position and velocities graphs depicted clearly the air drag effect on the ball's movements. The entire raw data are compared with a theoretical model and therefore terminal and initial velocities can be extracted as adjusted parameters from simple mathematical fits. The Reynolds number and the drag coefficient calculated for each ball agree with those found in the literature.
Descriptors: Science Instruction, Physics, Scientific Concepts, Concept Formation, Motion, Telecommunications, Handheld Devices, Technology Uses in Education, Graphs, Equations (Mathematics), Video Technology, Science Experiments
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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