Quote:
Originally Posted by JamesCH95
In short: make the kicker lighter, it will more efficiently transfer momentum to the soccer ball
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Curious. Experimentally, we found that adding mass to one of our prototype kickers increased it's range from something like 5 feet to 15 feet. Then again, that prototype kicker was an extremely light and small piece of metal.
If you run some numbers with Va = 0 and Vb = 1, and the coefficient of restitution equal to 1 in the equation given at
Wikipedia, you will find that equal masses of the two objects will result in perfect momentum transfer. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that since our kickers are swinging around an axis, what you really want is equal moments of inertia around the axis for perfect energy transfer.