Normal Collisions of Spheres: A Literature Survey on Available Experiments

TL;DR

This literature survey compiles and analyzes experimental data on normal collisions of spheres, focusing on the relation between the coefficient of restitution and incident velocity to evaluate and compare existing models.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of experimental techniques and data on sphere collisions, digitizes raw e(v) data, and offers a classification framework based on established collision models.

Findings

Compiled experimental data on e(v) for sphere collisions.

Provided digitized raw data for further analysis.

Classified experiments according to collision model expectations.

Abstract

The central collision between two solid spheres or the normal collision between a sphere and a plate are important to understand in detail before studying more complex particle interactions. Models exist to describe this basic problem but are not always consistent with available experiments. An interesting benchmark to compare models and experiments is the relation between the normal coefficient of restitution e and the incident velocity v. In order to draw a broad comparison between experiments and models (Krijt, S., G\"uttler, C., Hei{\ss}elmann, D., Tielens, A.G.G.M., Dominik, C., Energy dissipation in head-on collisions of spheres, submitted), we provide in this article an overview on the literature describing experiments on normal collisions, preferably providing data on e(v). We will briefly summarize our expectation on this relation according to an established collision model in order to classify these experiments. We will then provide an overview on experimental techniques, which we found in the summarized articles, as well as a listing of all experiments along with a description of the main features of these. The raw data on e(v) of the listed experiments were digitized and are provided with this article.