Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Behavior Of A Falling Particle In A Funnel, Tahani Hassn Aldahri

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

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 …