The force acting on a ball dropped on a solid surface was
measured using a 50 mm diam, 4 mm thick ceramic piezo
disk bonded with superglue to one end of a 50 mm diam
brass rod of length 100 mm, as shown in Fig. 1. A ball was
dropped or thrown at low speed directly onto the piezo disk,
and the voltage output was measured, on a digital storage
oscilloscope, using a310 probe connected to light leads soldered
to the upper silvered surface of the piezo and to the
brass rod. The ball speeds v1 and v2 , just before and after
the impact, were measured by allowing the ball to fall
through two horizontal He–Ne laser beams located above the
upper surface of the piezo disk and separated vertically by 10
mm, as shown in Fig. 1. The beams were detected with a
photodiode and the ball velocity was calculated from the
time delays between the photodiode signals and the piezo
signal. A small correction was made to the measured velocities
to allow for the gravitational acceleration ~or deceleration!
of the ball after ~or before! it crossed the two laser
beams.
Using the measured F wave form, and the measured values
of v1 and v2 , it was then possible to calculate the y
displacement as a function of time, and to calibrate the sensitivity
of the piezo. The piezo was found to generate an
output voltage of 1.0 V per 34 N. Other design features and
some limitations of this technique are as follows.
~1! The capacitance of the piezo disk was 3 nF, but it was
artificially increased to 5 nF by connecting a 2 nF capacitor
in parallel with the disk in order to increase the RC time
constant ~of the disk and the 10 MV probe! to 50 ms. The
force wave forms are reproduced reliably only if the discharge
time constant is much longer than the duration of the
impulse.
~2! The length of the brass rod was not sufficient to avoid
reflections off the far end of the rod. The transit time of a
pulse from the upper surface of the piezo to the lower end of
the rod was 30 ms, resulting in a standing wave of period 60
ms or frequency 16.7 kHz. This mode was not excited with
any significant amplitude by any of the balls tested since the
ball contact time was longer than 120 ms in all cases. As a
result, the frequency spectrum of the impulse did not extend
significantly beyond 10 kHz. To avoid reflections off the
table and floor, the rod was isolated from the table with a soft
rubber support, as shown in Fig. 1. Simply holding the rod in
one hand also provided excellent isolation, but the distance
to the laser beams was then not known accurately. In principle,
a much longer rod could have been used to delay the
reflected pulse, but a rod of length at least 10 m would have
been required to avoid the reflected pulse from a tennis ball.
A rod of length about 1.5 m is ideal for studying the impact
of small steel balls, and it also generates textbook examples
of compressional ~nondispersive! and transverse ~strongly
dispersive! wave modes that can be detected with a small
piezo at one or both ends.
~3! A large diameter disk was chosen to avoid saturation
of the force wave form that would occur if the contact area of
the ball exceeded the area of the disk. Even so, measurements
for a tennis ball were restricted to velocities less than
8ms21 since the contact diameter of the ball exceeded 50
mm at ball speeds greater than 8ms21
. In the case of a highspeed
tennis ball, or a large diameter ball such as a basketball,
a piezo larger in diameter than 50 mm