Why Does a Tennis Ball Lose Its Bounce?
“Hi my name is Lincoln Ward. I’m the director of The Austin Tennis Center here in Austin, Texas. Today we are going to talk about why your tennis ball loses its bounce. All tennis balls come out of the can fully pressurized and have a great bounce to it. Over time your ball tends to get a little bit deader I guess, it kind of dies. You can press in on it and it feels like it is losing its pressure. That’s exactly what happens. When your tennis ball is first made of course a rubber sphere, it is pressurized. It is pressurized about one and a half times what is outside in the atmosphere. They put a gas inside there so that when the ball bounces the gas tries to push out on the ball to regain its shape. Every time your ball bounces it deforms just a little bit and the gas inside pushes back to its original form to get that spherical shape again. Over time, however, the gas molecules are smaller than the rubber surrounding it so it is going to escape and get outside to the atmosphere and o
