Abstract
The performance of a table tennis racket is often associated with subjective or quantitative criteria such as the adhesion, the control and the speed. Overall, the so-called performance aims at characterizing the impact with the ball. Ultimately, the polymeric layers glued onto the wooden blade play a key role, as evidenced in a previous work where the normal linear (no spin) impact of a ball onto polymeric layers was experimentally and numerically investigated. In this work, more realistic loading conditions leading to varying the incident angle and spin of the ball, were explored. While the sole linear restitution coefficient was determined in the anterior normal impact study, new physical metrics were identified to describe fully the trajectory of the reflected ball after impact. A companion 3D finite elements model was developed where the polymeric time-dependent dissipative compliant behavior measured with dynamic mechanical analysis and compression tests was accounted for. The confrontations with the experimental data highlighted the key role of the polymer intrinsic properties along with the friction coefficient between the ball and the polymer external layer.
Highlights
A table tennis racket comprises two polymeric sheets, the foam and the compact that are glued together and on to a wooden paddle
The confrontations with the experimental data highlighted the key role of the polymer intrinsic properties along with the friction coefficient between the ball and the polymer external layer
Both polymeric constituents are in their rubbery state at ambient temperature so that they exhibit large and mostly instantaneous reversible deformation when impacted by a ball
Summary
A table tennis racket comprises two polymeric sheets, the foam and the compact that are glued together and on to a wooden paddle Both polymeric constituents are in their rubbery state at ambient temperature so that they exhibit large and mostly instantaneous reversible deformation when impacted by a ball. When the rebound of the ball was the focus of attention, the coefficient of restitution, corresponding to the ratio between the incident and reflected linear velocities could be calculated [2,8]. This parameter only relied on the kinematic description of the impact and on global dynamics so that little to no attention was often given to the materials description. The coefficient of restitution metric characterized the overall speed performance during impact, which corresponded to the performance of a given combination of impactor and target as a whole
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