Quote:
Originally Posted by dash_riprock
I was being tongue-in-cheek Mark. As an aerobatic pilot I have come to know a little bit about drag and laminar airflow. It seems to me that the drag on the (relatively) slow-moving bat handle would be very small, as would be the corresponding benefit of laminar flow over that 6-8" span. So I believe it is more of a sales gimmick than a revolution in bat technology. But you obviously know more about the fluid dynamics than I do, so maybe you could calculate an estimated increase in bat speed. I'd be interested in your findings.
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The act of a bat striking a bat is an example of a
collision; actually it is an example of an
elastic collision. A
collision occurs when a relatively large force acts on colliding particles for a relatively short time. The basic idea of a
collision is that the motion of at least one of the colliding particles changes rather abruptly and there is a relatively clean seperation of times that are "before the collision" and those that are "after the collision," in other words an
elastic collision.
A force that acts for a period of time that is short compared to the time of observation of the system is called an
impulsive force.
Momentum is mass X velocity. When
momentum is integrated with respect to time over a very very small amount of time one get
impulse.
Both the kinetic energy and momentum of the system is conserved and since this is an elastic collision, without going through the deriviation of the equation: The sum of the initial and final velocities of the bat equals the sum of the intitial and final velocities of the ball. Assuming that the collision is an elastic one-dimentional collision the final velocity of the ball equals the sum of the initial and final velocities of the bat minus the initial velocity of the ball.
We know that baseball is a game of inches (or cm,
; I prefer the metric system) and it only takes a small increase the final velocity of the ball to mean the difference between an infielder making an each catch to start a double plan the the batted ball being out of the reach of the infielder.
MTD, Sr.