Inelastic collision
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An inelastic collision, in contrast to an elastic collision, is a collision in which kinetic energy is not conserved due to the action of internal friction.
A bouncing ball captured with a stroboscopic flash at 25 images per second. Each impact of the ball is inelastic, meaning that energy dissipates at each bounce. Ignoring air resistance, the square root of the ratio of the height of one bounce to that of the preceding bounce gives the coefficient of restitution for the ball/surface impact.
Momentum
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In Newtonian mechanics, momentum is the product of the mass and velocity of an object. It is a vector quantity, possessing a magnitude and a direction. If m is an object's mass and v is its velocity,
Inelastic collision
…before). Averaged across an entire sample, molecular collisions are elastic. Although inelastic collisions do not conserve kinetic energy, they do obey conservation of momentum. Simple ballistic pendulum problems obey the conservation of kinetic energy only when the block swings to its largest angle. In nuclear physics, an…
Momentum of a pool cue ball is transferred to the racked balls after collision.
Ibn Sīnā (980–1037)
René Descartes (1596–1650)
Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695)