Computational Aerodynamics of Baseball, Soccer Ball and Volleyball

Abstract

Recent advances in the computing power of modern computers have made computational fluid dynamics studies particularly interesting and feasible. We used the computational fluid dynamics method to solve the physical governing equations of the air flow around balls of popular sports in typical game conditions and investigated their aerodynamics and the flight characteristics. The work presented here describes the construction of the computational fluid dynamics models for a baseball, volleyball and two soccer balls, and the use of these models to analyze the effects of spin rate, surface pattern, and size for their respective sports. The computational results show significant correlations between ball spin rate and the aerodynamics forces, including drag and lift, for soccer ball, baseball and volleyball. For the baseball, the lift and lateral forces are shown to have also been influenced by the lace orientation.