Average Force on a Batted Ball

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This Demonstration calculates the force exerted on a baseball by a swinging bat as a function of the initial speed of the pitched ball and the final speed of the batted ball
. The change in momentum of the ball is equal to the impulse, which is the integral of the force
over time:
. Thus the average force is
, where the ball is in contact with the bat between times
and
, and
is the momentum. High-speed photography shows that the time interval
is approximately 0.001 second. The weight of a regulation baseball is 5.25 ounces, or 5.25/16 pounds, which corresponds to a mass of
slugs, using the Imperial system of units, with length in feet, time in seconds, mass in slugs, and force in pounds.
Contributed by: Belanie Nagiel (January 2016)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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