Atennis ball is dropped from a height of 10.0 m. it rebounds off the floor and comes up to a height of only 4.00 m on its first rebound. (ignore the small amount of time the ball is in contact with the floor.) (a) determine the ball’s speed just before it hits the floor on the way down. (b) determine the ball’s speed as it leaves the floor on its way up to its first rebound height. (c) how long is the ball in the air from the time it is dropped until the time it reaches its maximum height on the first rebound?

a)

b)

c)

Explanation:

Our most valuable tool in solving this problem will be the conservation of mechanical energy:

That is, mechanical energy is equal to the sum of potential and kinetic energy, and  the value of this mechanical energy will remain constant. (as long as there is no dissipation)

For a point particle, we have that kinetic energy is:

Where m is the mass, and V is the particle's velocity,

Potential energy on the other hand is:

where g is the acceleration due to gravity () and h is the height of the particle. How do we define the height? It's a bit of an arbitrary definition, but we just need to define a point for which , a "floor". conveniently we pick the actual floor as our reference height, but it could be any point whatsoever.

Let's calculate  the mechanical energy just before the ball is dropped:

As we drop the ball, speed must be initially zero, and the height from which we drop it is 10 meters, therefore:

That's it, the actual value of m is not important now, as we will see.

Now, what's the potential energy at the bottom? Let's see:

At the bottom, just before we hit the floor, the ball is no longer static, it has a velocity V that we want to calculate, on the other hand, it's height is zero! therefore we set

So, at the bottom, all the energy is kinetic, while at the top all the energy is potential, but these energies are the same! Because of conservation of mechanical energy. Thus we can set one equal to the other:

And so we have found the velocity of the ball as it hits the floor.

Now, after the ball has bounced, we can again do an energy analysis, and we will get the same result, namely:

where h is the maximum height of the ball, and v is the maximum speed of the ball (which is always attained at the bottom). If we know that now the height the ball achieves is 4 meters, plugging that in:

Now for C, we need to know for how long the ball will be in the air from the time we drop it from 10 meters, and how long it will take the ball to reach its new maximum height of 4 meters.

As the acceleration of gravity is a constant, that means that the velocity of the ball will change at a constant rate. When something changes at a constant rate, what is its average?  It's the average between initial and final velocity, look at diagram to understand. The area under the Velocity vs time curve is the displacement of the ball, and:

what's the average speed when the ball is descending?

so the time it takes the ball to go down is:

Now, when it goes up, it's final and initial speeds are 0 and 8.86 meters per second, thus the average speed is:

and the time it takes to go up is:

When we add both times , we get: