Colin
Science Fair Abstract
2-4-10
Abstract: I’ve always wondered about temperature’s affect on a tennis ball’s bounce. Whenever I play, the ball seems to be harder and bounces lower on colder days, and in this experiment and I wanted to find out its affect on a tennis ball’s bounce. Overall the main purpose of my experiment was to find out which tennis ball will bounce higher, a colder one or a warmer one.
I placed four brand new Penn tennis balls in four different temperature conditions. The four conditions were: the oven at 120 degrees, the freezer at 0 degrees, the fridge at 40 degrees and then the room temperature ball at 67 degrees. I then dropped each tennis ball from a height of 7ft. and 5in. to find my results.
At the end of my experiment, the warmer tennis balls bounced much higher than the colder ones. The average height of the bounce of the oven heated tennis ball was 4.841 feet, and the height of the bounce of the freezer chilled tennis balls was 2.8 feet, which is approximately a two foot difference. I concluded that on a warm day it is easier to hit a tennis ball farther and make it bounce higher, because in my experiment the heated tennis ball bounces higher than the cold tennis ball.
