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To: Born to Conserve
The size and acceleration of the object before it impacts will give you the mass of the object, and the angle of deflection and velocity before and after the impact will give you an idea of how much work (damage) was done on the wing.

Even if the conservation-of-energy study could be accurately done in the way you have suggested, it wouldn't reveal anything about damage done to the wing. (Determining the amount of energy transfered to the wing wouldn't tell us anything very useful.)

I presume NASA has already done this and seen how foolish they were. That would explain the shameful obfuscation in their briefings...I am sensing GROSS NEGLIGENCE...First point of negligence: If this video had been analyzed by a competent engineer, they would have freaked.

I don't think so. I would urge you to leave it to the engineers.

16 posted on 02/02/2003 3:05:28 PM PST by the_doc
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To: Born to Conserve; CCWoody
By way of further explanation, let me point out that we don't know the shape of the surface of the chunk of insulation (which I assume is calcium silicate or something similar). Nor can we tell what points on that surface actually contacted the wing surface.

This matters a great deal, because elastic-collision energy conservation equations depend on knowing the coefficients for the involved materials. And for deformable (non-elastic) materials, the coefficients are geometry-dependent.

We also don't know the exact angle of contact with the wing surface in the collision, because we don't the exact point of contact with wing surface. That makes the calculation of the skidding friction energy transfer--which could be considerable--essentially impossible. (Besides, it would probably take a laboratory study to determine that dynamic friction coefficient for the insulation-to-tile collision model anyway. This would be inordinately complicated, by the way, due to the effects of deformations on the less-than-rigid insulation.)

As a related matter, we don't know how fast the insulation was spinning when it hit the wing or how much that changed as a result of the collusion with the wing. (The video's resolution is not good enough.)

With these unknowns, I don't think we can calculate how non-elastic the behavior of the wing itself was. And that is what we would need to calculate if we want to estimate the potential that it was damaged.

18 posted on 02/02/2003 4:24:29 PM PST by the_doc
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