What is it about?

Imagine a bouncy ball that rests on a horizontal platform. The platform starts to move up and down. If the motion of the platform is not to fast, the ball should stay on the platform without bouncing. As the platform goes faster (acceleration increases beyond gravity) the ball will begin to bounce and the air around it will affect its motion. We study how periodic/chaotic the impacts of the ball on the platform are.

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Why is it important?

A bouncing ball on a vibrating platform is a well known chaotic system. We wanted to add one further degree of complexity which, incidentally, had already beed realised experimentally.

Perspectives

This is mainly a theoretical problem; the applications can be see though the use of our results by other researchers in their own work.

Dr Diego P Sánchez Lana
University of Colorado Boulder

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Chaotic dynamics of an air-damped bouncing ball, November 2002, American Physical Society (APS),
DOI: 10.1103/physreve.66.057201.
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