Data Analysis

Welcome to another week of my Senior Project Journey!

This past week has been dedicated to just data analysis and reaching conclusions with my experiment. Everything experiment-related is done and now it is just finishing up the report and presentation in the last stages of the journey. 

The first aspect I measured from the videos I recorded was the final landing position of the World Cup balls. My grid setup allowed me to sort the final landing position into 9 boxes. As I took my measurements, I saw that the 2022 World Cup ball had the most consistency regarding the final landing position. It was followed by the 2014 ball with slightly less consistency while the 2010 World Cup ball had the most inconsistency, as the final landing position was all over the place. Note that I had to throw out 2 data points as the camera quality was not good enough. I measured 13 final landing spots for each ball. 

So, that is that right? Experiment done, the 2010 ball had the most unpredictable nature among the three balls, the more smooth the ball is, the more unexpected the ball is right?

Well, it is quite complicated. Several major errors could impact the ball’s trajectory. 

Perhaps the biggest error that could happen is the recoil of the ball launcher. The person who showed out the machine, Andres, pointed out there might be some inconsistency when it came to the ball launching out of the machine. When it came to the data recording, I estimated a plus or minus 2 ft out of the 43 ft traveled. I also measured 0.1 seconds of error as I analyzed videos to the one-hundredth of a second. This means the error was very small, coming in at around 5%. I am confident with the data gathered from the speed of the ball. It was relatively consistent. 

Now, for the bigger issue: the rotation rate measurement. The rotation rate was very hard to measure, if not impossible at times. I tried analyzing the rotation from different camera angles and the one that was the best was the camera of where the ball was launched, as it was able to cover the entire flight trajectory. Unfortunately, the ball flew far to the point where it was unrecognizable to measure the rotation rate. I tried to modify the rotation rate down to measure the time it takes to rotate 90 degrees and got the data points, although the error percent was very big. Just being off by 0.01 seconds can make a huge difference in terms of the rotation rate so that is something I am not confident in publishing. 

So although there is evidence that the more smooth a ball is, the more unpredictable the ball would be as well as the error of the recoil of the ball launcher, having a big error when it came to measuring the rotation rate makes this experiment conclusion in my eyes, inconclusive.