This post is about visualisation of gyroscopic effects of a spinning object.

With appropriate initial conditions, a ball thrown into a tube can pop out of the tube. This can be reproduced with a MapleSim model

Throwing_a_ball_into_a_tube_A.msim

To hit a perfect shot without trial and error, time reversal was applied for the model (reversed calculation results of a ball exiting the tube are used as initial conditions for the shot). This worked straight away and shows that this model is sufficiently conservative.

This phenomenon has recently attracted attention on YouTube. For example, Steve Mold demonstrates the effect and provides an intuitive explanation which he considers incomplete because the resulting vertical oscillation of the ball does not match his experiments and theory. He suspects that the assumption of a constant axis of rotation of the ball is responsible for this discrepancy.

However, he cannot demonstrate a change of the axis of rotation. In general, the visualization of the rotation axis of a ball is difficult to achieve in an experiment. On the contrary, visualization is much easier in a simulation experiment with this model:

Throwing_a_ball_into_a_tube_B.msim

The following can be observed for a trajectroy that does not exit the tube:

At the apex (the top) of the trajectory, the vector of rotation (red bold in the following images) points downwards and is essentially parallel to the axis of the cylinder. The graph to the left shows the vertical (in green) position and one horizontal position (in red). The model applies gravity in negative y direction.

On the way down, the axis of rotation points away from the direction of travel (the ball orbits counterclockwise in the top view).

At the bottom, the vector of rotation points towards the axis of the cylinder.

On the way up, the axis of rotation points in the direction of travel.

These observations confirm that the assumption of a constant axis of rotation is too simplified. Effectively the ball performs a precession movement know from gyroscopes. More specifically, the precession movement of the rotation axis rotates in the opposite direction of the rotation of the ball.

However, the knowledge and the visualization of this precession movement do not provide more insight for a better intuitive explanation of the effect. As the ball acts like a gyroscope, a second attempt is to visualize forces that perturb the motion of the ball. Besides gravity, there are contact forces exerted by the tube. The normal force at the contact as well as the gravitational force cannot generate a perturbing momentum since they point to the center of the ball. Only frictional forces at the contact can cause a perturbing momentum.

Contrary to the visualization of the axis of rotation, visualization of contact forces is not straight forward in MapleSim, because neither the contact point nor the contact forces are directly provided by components of the MapleSim library. Only for a single contact point, a work-around is possible by measuring the reactive forces on the tube and then displaying these forces in a moving reference frame at the contact point. The location and the orientation of this frame are calculated with built-in mathematical components. To illustrate the additional effort, the image below highlights in yellow the components only needed for the visualization of the above images, all other components were required to visualize the contact forces and frictional moments.