Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Degree

Master of Science

Program

Physics

Supervisor

Dr. John deBruyn

Abstract

Recent theoretical work has suggested that a frictional, inelastic, spherical particle falling under gravity through a symmetric funnel will display interesting behavior as a function of the angle of the funnel walls. We have studied this system experimentally, using high-speed video to record the particle trajectories. By analyzing the video images, we have analyzed the time the ball spends in the funnel and its energy loss as functions of the angle of the walls with respect to the horizontal. The coefficient of restitution was also varied by using different balls and funnel materials. We found some similarities and differences between our results and the theoretical results.

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