Help with my bouncy ball lab (I know the factors just not how to approach them) In my physics lab we need to determine the factors that account for the energy "loss" during a high bounce ball bounce. I know that energy is "lost" (not really) to heat, air resistance, and sound. The problem is we have not been taught how to calculate air resistance (we also can't use what we haven't learned), and I don't know how to calculate sound and heat individually. Wouldn't momentum have something to do with it? I need two factors that a regular high school physics can calculate.
 A: Sound intensity is measured in dB, which is a logarithmic scale of power per unit area. There are plenty of examples online of how loud a particular sound is - compare it to the sound of your ball, convert to power per unit area, and multiply by the area of the sphere of the radius at which you are observing the sound. The energy will be quite a small number (especially after you estimate the duration of the sound... much less than one second).
Friction during impact (either within the material of the ball, or between the ball and the surface) will lead to heating of the ball and surface: the temperature change will be small for normal "bouncy ball" situations. You calculate it from the loss in potential energy:
$$mg\Delta h = m c \Delta t&$
Where $c$ is the specific heat capacity. 
Third, you can estimate the energy due to air drag from the equation
$$F = \frac12 \rho v^2 C_D$$
where you can use density of air 1.22 kg/m^3, $C_D=0.5$ for a sphere, and estimate the velocity from the drop height.
I believe the majority of the loss will be due to friction/heating, and that the temperature difference will be too small to measure. The ball will lose excess heat to the environment due to air flowing past. If you could repeat the experiment in an evacuated tube you could eliminate / reduce the effect of air drag and sound-in-air (there is still the potential of elastic sound waves in the surface though...)
See if that gets you going...
