Behavior of small restitution mechanism under microgravity environment

The authors have studied the mechanism, which achieves the low restitution coefficient under the microgravity environment,. and realized that the mechanism which is constructed out of a rigid shell with balls stored internally makes the restitution coefficient small. On impact, the balls will dissipate energy relative to each other and hence will dissipate the total energy. High efficiency in energy dissipation means the low restitution coefficient. In this paper, the relations among the parameters in this mechanism and the restitution coefficient is analyzed numerically, and confirmed through the microgravity tests.