Question

In real life, collisions are neither purely elastic nor inelastic, but instead, fall somewhere between. However, you can still classify many collisions as primarily elastic or inelastic. For example, hitting a baseball is a great example of an elastic collision, whereas catching the baseball is a great example of an inelastic collision.

1. Explain why hitting and catching a baseball are great examples of each type of collision.

2. Describe another real-world example of a perfectly elastic collision.

3. Describe another real-world example of a perfectly inelastic collision.

Answer 1

1) hitting the baseball is an example of an elastic collision because the kinetic energy of the ball is almost conserved, suppose that you always hit with the same force, a ball that comes fast will go a lot far away than a ball that comes slow.

Catching the ball is kinda inelastic because the total energy of the ball is absorbed when it is catched.

2) Another example can be bouncing a basketball ball against the ground, if you drop it from a distance H, the ball will bounce to a heigt h that is smaller than H, but is almost perfectly elastic.

3) Other example of perfectly inelastic will be other case where the kinetic energy is almost totally lost, it can be trhowing a piece a t-shirt to the ground, it does not bounce, so all the kinetic energy is lost when it hits the ground.

Answer 2

1. Hitting a baseball is a great example of an elastic collision because there is a complete conservation of kinetic energy; some of the energy of the bat is imparted onto the ball, and the system energy remains the same. Conversely, when a ball is caught in a glove, that is a perfectly inelastic collision: the kinetic energy of the system is completely absorbed into the glove.
2. Another example of a completely elastic collision would be someone jumping onto a trampoline: they bounce back up with the same amount of energy with which they began (albeit in the opposite direction).
3. An example of a perfectly inelastic collision would be someone jumping into a foam pit: the foam absorbs all of the kinetic energy of the jumper and none of it is conserved.