Tabletop experiment to determine the center of percussion of a baseball bat

Abstract

The center of percussion is an essential physics concept with a variety of practical applications. For any handheld object there is a point that, once a force is applied to it, results in no acceleration at the hands because the translational and angular accelerations from the force cancel each other out. This point is referred to as the center of percussion. Although the concept of the center of percussion is applicable to a variety of different areas, this paper focuses on America’s favorite pastime; the sport of baseball. The center of percussion of a baseball bat, also referred to as the “sweet spot”, is the optimal spot for making contact with a moving baseball. This paper demonstrates the development of a tabletop model for visually explaining this process of identifying the center of percussion to an audience. The setup is an instrumented experiment with an integrated data acquisition system to collect, visualize, and analyze the data for the demonstration of the process to identify a baseball bat’s center of percussion.