CFD Presentation

Computational aerodynamics of baseball,

soccer ball and volleyball
Pouya Jalilian, Patrick K. Kreun, MohammadHady M.
Makhmalbaf, William W. Liou
By
Ardhika Setiawan
20185112
Smart Powertrain Lab.
Reference Report

Smart Powertrain Lab.

2. Geometry

Smart Powertrain Lab.

 Flow condition

The flow of air around the sporting balls presented in this study is
governed by the Navier-Stokes equations, the solutions of which describe the
flow field around the sports balls, and thus their aerodynamics characteristics,
such as lift and drag. A numerical method for solving the Navier-Stokes
equations involves the use of computer to integrate the differential equations and
yield a solution.
A crucial aspect of properly setting up a CFD model is the definition of the
boundary conditions. The primary boundary conditions to consider here are the fluid
inlet, fluid outlet, outer fluid boundary, and ball-fluid interface.
To describe the rotational motion, a moving mesh boundary condition was applied.

Smart Powertrain Lab.

A ball geometry was imported and a computational domain for the fluid was
constructed around the ball by applying a Boolean operation to subtract the
ball volume from the surroundings (air). This results in the computational
domain for the fluid with a matched fluid-ball boundary. To allow a greater
control over the sizes of the mesh elements, three intermediate regions have
been used in the computational domain, as illustrated in Figure 2. They
include :
(1) a small sphere immediately surrounding the sporting ball,
(2) a larger sphere encompassing the sporting ball and the first sphere, and
(3) a cylinder which encloses the ball and the two spheres.
Smart Powertrain Lab.
 Software

The ANSYS FLUENT 14 software has been applied in various industries

and is used in this study.

Actual :
• Drawing program : Solidwork 2017
• Simulation program : Ansys 19.0

Smart Powertrain Lab.

 The ball spins around the horizontal axis
perpendicular to the ball’s velocity vector and the
side force is neglected. With the Newton’s second
law, the equation governing the motion of the ball
can be written as
• m is the mass of the ball
• g the vector gravitational acceleration
• a ball’s vector acceleration
• FD and FL are drag and lift force vectors,
The x and y components of (1) may be written as

Smart Powertrain Lab.

 Scheme
The above system of equations consists of two second order nonlinear ordinary
differential equations. The fourth-order Runge-kutta method has been used in a
Mathcad (15th version) code to solve the above equations numerically for the x and
y coordinates of the ball and, thus, the trajectory. The drag and lift coefficients are
assumed constant throughout the ball flight.

Resource:
https://math.okstate.edu/people/yqwa
ng/teaching/math4513_fall11/Notes/ru
ngekutta.pdf

Smart Powertrain Lab.

Results

Table 2 presents the simulated drag

coefficient CD and lift coefficient CL for
all the cases. Comparing the results of
Cases 1 and 3, it can be seen that for
the generic soccer ball and volleyball,
the higher spin rate in Case 3 increases
CD and CL. For the baseball, the lower
spin rate in Case 3 decreases both CD
and CL from those of Case 1.
Smart Powertrain Lab.
Smart Powertrain Lab.
We calculated the trajectory of the generic
soccer ball with r=1.225kg.m-3,
g=9.81m.s-1. For the generic soccer ball,
m=0.430kg and A=0.0380m2. Also, q=20o
at t=0 s is assumed.

Smart Powertrain Lab.