An experimental and computational study of tennis ball aerodynamics

In computational study, commercial software FLUENT 6.0 was used. In order to understand the simplified model first, a sphere was made using Solidworks (see Figure 1). Then two simplified tennis balls without fuzz were also made which are shown in Figures 2 & 4. Two simplified tennis balls were constructed with the following physical geometry: diameter 65 mm, mass 56 grams, seam with 2 mm width, 1.5 mm depth; and 5 mm width, 1.5 mm depth respectively. All models were then imported to FLUENT 6.0 and GAMBIT was used to generate mesh and refinement. The major consideration when performing the computational analysis is to model a simulation with a reasonable amount of computing resources with some degrees of accuracy, the models for the wind tunnel was created as a three dimensional sketch. A control volume was created to simulate the wind tunnel and the ball was placed in the control volume. The control volume (wind tunnel) can be scaled down to reduce the computational cost due to the fact that modelling the full scale wind tunnel with respect to the small size of the tennis ball will create the unused domain of the wind tunnel where the areas which are not important for the analysis will also be calculated if whole domain of wind tunnel is created. Therefore the reasonable size of domain will be considered to enhance the calculation speed and save the computational time and space. The sphere was used for a benchmark comparison.