Physical Properties
According to one study "If a pen is stuck in a hard rubber ball and dropped from a certain height, the pen may bounce to several times that height." If a Super Ball is dropped without spin onto a hard surface, with a small ball bearing on top of the Super Ball, the bearing rebounds to a great height.
High school physics teachers use Super Balls to educate students on usual and unusual models of impacts.
The "rough" nature of a Super Ball makes its impact characteristics different from otherwise similar smooth balls. The resulting behavior is quite complex. The Super Ball has been used as an illustration of the principle of Time Reversal Invariance.
A Super Ball is observed to reverse the direction of spin on each bounce. This effect depends on the tangential compliance and frictional effect in the collision, it cannot be explained by rigid body impact theory, and would not occur were the ball perfectly rigid. (Tangential compliance is the degree to which one body clings to rather than slips over another at the point of impact.)
Read more about this topic: Super Ball
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