First, calculate the velocity of the lower ball at the collision with the ground. We use the conservation of energy to find the velocity of the bottom ball at impact with the ground. We can equate the change in gravitational potential energy to the change in kinetic energy to find this velocity:
The following is a proof of why the velocity of the ball after colliding with the ground is equal in magnitude, but opposite in direction, but you don't have to know how to prove it.
Now we use the conservation of energy to get a second equation which we also further simplify:
We can now replace
of the energy equation with
from the momentum equation:
Go back to the momentum equation and replace
with
. (
)
Now we use the conservation of energy (in this case kinetic) for a second equation into which we also plug the masses and simplify:
We go back to the equation for
from above and solve for
and plug it into the simplified energy equation:
Now we have a big mess for simplifying and solving for
.
Now we can use the quadratic equation to find
:
The second value is the initial velocity, so the first value of
is the final velocity of
.
From the result of
, obtain the max height of
. We will find out how high above the collision point it goes (z) and then add on its initial height at impact of two times the radius of the lower ball at the end to find the final height above ground that the upper ball gets to (y).
