Acronyms that contain the term inelastic collision 

Inelastic collision

An inelastic collision, in contrast to an elastic collision, is a collision in which kinetic energy is not conserved. In collisions of macroscopic bodies, some kinetic energy is turned into vibrational energy of the atoms, causing a heating effect, and the bodies are deformed. The molecules of a gas or liquid rarely experience perfectly elastic collisions because kinetic energy is exchanged between the molecules' translational motion and their internal degrees of freedom with each collision. At any one instant, half the collisions are – to a varying extent – inelastic, and half could be described as “super-elastic”. Averaged across an entire sample, molecular collisions are elastic. Inelastic collisions may not conserve kinetic energy, but they do obey conservation of momentum. Simple ballistic pendulum problems obey the conservation of kinetic energy only when the block swings to its largest angle. In nuclear physics, an inelastic collision is one in which the incoming particle causes the nucleus it strikes to become excited or to break up.

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