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Optimal Parameters To Circumvent Obstacles With A Golf Ball
Optimal Parameters To Circumvent Obstacles With A Golf Ball
Contents
1 Background
2 Assumptions
3 Calculations
4 Methods
10
10
11
8 References
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Background
The problem of a golf ball stuck behind a tree is a common one. The physics
of getting the ball out from behind the tree is one that requires the application
of the aerodynamic properties of spheres. In particular the most challenging
part is the application of the Magnus Effect - the effect that curves a rotating
objects trajectory based on size, shape, velocity, angular velocity etc. (refer
to magnus equation in eqns 1). In addition, one must take into account the
clubs torque, angle of golfers stance, angle of hit, etc. to deliver the proper
parameters to the golf ball.
In this particular problem, we have a golfer whose golf ball is stuck 10
meters from the center of a tree with 5 meter long branches protruding from
all sides. His golf ball must reach the green area that is 10 meters in diameter
and 120 meters from the green. This problem is diagrammed below in Figure
1.
Figure 2: Diagram of golf ball landing in green and staying in green example
(top view)
Figure 3: Diagram of golf ball landing on the fairway and ending up on green
example (top view)
With these two observed test cases, we begin making assumptions and
simplifications to make the analysis more relevant to the final solution.
Assumptions
are based on a generic competitive golf ball, with a radius of 21mm, a mass of
45 grams and 400 dimples on the surface, with dimple diameter of 0.39mm
and dimple depth of 0.003mm. The impact times and constants used are
those determined experimentally for the Titleist Pro V1. The club used in
our calculations is a 3-iron with a mass of .27 kg, which would provide both
sufficient range and spin. For our calculations we can properly assume that
the effective mass of the club is in its head, for a perfectly elastic collision
with the golf ball.
In addition, we made assumptions of our drag coefficients as it largely
depends on the constant shape of the golf ball. This is a reasonable approximation as the velocity of the ball, which contributes to the Reynolds
number and in turn contributes to the coefficient, will remain relatively constant. NASA experimentally found that the shape of the ball will contribute
largest, and then speed, and as such we decided that our drag coefficient
would be 0.5. We assumed a relatively spherical object, because a sphere
and rough golf ball behave almost interchangeably when the Reynolds number is below or equal to a magnitude of 104.
For the green, we assumed a medium-speed surface as defined by the
USGA, with a stimp reading of 2.6m (8.5ft). This value is consistent with
most other publications. For bouncing motion, we used a coefficient of restitution er = 0.83 between the ball and the green, which lies well within the
range calculated experimentally. We also simplified our motion by terminating bounce at the 10th impact with the ground, after which the ball would
begin rolling motion. We make this assumption because golf balls have a
high amount of elasticity with the ground, but will eventually have bounces
so small that it would be physically more accurate to neglect bounce.
For the maximum speed that a player could feasibly hit, we took the
highest hit speeds for the PGA tour and rounded them down for convenience.
The rounded figure is still higher than the speeds hit by all but the top ten
competitors, and thus gives an accurate estimate for the maximum speed any
human could impart to a golf ball on a regular basis. This value we used is
80 meters per second.
Calculations
Ftotal = Fg + FD + FM
(1)
1
1
(2)
Ftotal = mb a = mb g + CL Av 2 CD Av 2
2
2
However, because the forces acting upon the ball all acted upon it in
different directions, it was evident that it would be necessary to decompose
this into a vector form as per the selected coordinate axes. The resulting
decomposition is displayed below.
i
1
Fx = CD Avx2 + CL R
2
vx
(3)
k
1
Fy = CD Avy2 + CL R
2
vy
(4)
1
i
Fz = mb g CD Avz2 + CL R
(5)
2
vz
With further simplification, it becomes evident that we must solve a series
of nonlinear differential equations:
x =
1 1
i
( CD Ax 2 + CL R )
mb 2
x
(6)
y =
1 1
k
( CD Ay 2 + CL R )
mb 2
y
(7)
i
1 1
( CD Az 2 + CL R )
(8)
mb 2
z
To circumvent the issue of a difficult nonlinear differential equation, we
numerically solved for values that would give us thetas, and velocities to land
us in the green. However, even with numerical methods, a solution would be
z = g
2
vxy
sin(2)
g
(9)
k
350
2v12 X 2n
)
cos(ek+1
=
er sin(2enr ) +
mv1 RSek+1
r
r
g n=1
3
(10)
Here, v1 is the velocity of the ball when it first hits the ground, S is the
stimp reading of the green, m and R are the mass and radius of the ball
respectively and is the angle at which the ball first strikes the ground,
measured between the ground and the balls velocity vector. The constant er
is the coefficient of restitution and k is the number of times the ball bounces
before beginning roll. We chose a value of 10 for k as successive bounces
after this became extremely small, and the primary motion was horizontal.
The equation is based on the simplifying assumptions that all motion stays
within a 2-dimensional plane, that each bounce could be modeled as parabolic
projectile motion, and that the bounces are immediately successive - that is,
the ball does not skid between bounces, and the impact duration is negligible.
Furthermore, once the ball stops bouncing, we assume that it enters a state
of pure roll - again assuming that it will not skid or slip in any way. The first
term uses the simple Newtonian range formula for projectile motion summed
over k successive impacts. After the kth impact, we make the assumption
that there is no more vertical motion, and the ball exhibits pure roll, which
the second term accounts for using an equation for the rolling motion of a
golf ball with friction.
Later we will need to add a further constraint on the maximum linear
velocity of the golf ball. This can be calculated by assuming a circular trajectory about a central circle such that the chord between the initial golf
balls starting point and the maximum possible distance it could travel (130
meters) gives us the maximum possible angle of launch.
The reason we can assume a circular trajectory is because the Magnus
force would be equal to the centrifugal force about the central circle. With
this in mind, the rest is trigonometric analysis to find the maximum possible
launch angle.
Methods
for the other variables were direct results of our approximations and case
reduction. Below, we list our constraints:
q
j2 + k2 300 rad/s
35 m/s v 80 m/s
0.47 rad 1.4 rad
With these constraints, we attempted to compute the most optimal values
that would get the ball into the green without intersecting the tree.
We did this by numerically approximating the solution to the differential
equation given these constraints and looped through all possible values. We
approximated the solutions to 100 points between each constraint (a higher
degree of accuracy would require more computation time).
In our final code, the outputs returned the values within our range that
satisfied the condition of being both within the green and not intersecting
the tree obstacle. Because solving nonlinear differential equations tends to
be quite difficult to produce an analytical solution, we decided to take the
numerical approach and use approximations. The computational power required to solve a differential equation with multiple free variables using numerical approximation is infinite. This is because when we are given a free
variable in the differential equation, it will produce a new space of results.
For this paper, we had 3 free variables theta, velocity, and net angular velocity. For these, approximations were required to produce a result. However,
a logical error in our code resulted in bad outputs, and due to the limited
time, we decided to take a simpler approach by reducing the number of free
variables.
To approximate the range of velocities, angles and spins which would
land the ball in the green, we assumed a minimum and maximum trajectory,
which were arcs of circles beginning at the tee and ending at opposite ends
of the green. On these arcs, the Magnus force would always act towards
the center of the circle, allowing us to cast the equation in terms of circular
motion. Thus, we have the simplified expression for the Magnus force:
FM =
mb vy2
R
(11)
To find the range of values which would give us trajectories ending in the
green, we defined to be half the length of a chord of the circles, such that
2 was the distance from the tee to a point of the green.
equal to the launch angle of the golf ball on the xy plane.) These variables
can be determined by the equations that govern the behavior of the ball-club
interaction:
mb
v
1+
(13)
vcx =
2
mclub
vcy = k R
(14)
Here vcx is the x-component of the club heads velocity, and vcy is the ycomponent. We then used the results from the motion of the ball to calculate
the components of the clubs velocity, which then allowed us to also calculate
the swing angle of the golf club, which would determine the spin. The final
results of our computation are discussed in the Results section.
For our final results, we decided to compute the range of possible trajectories
while neglecting drag. This is a reasonable result to save computational
resources, reduce the number of free variables, and still have a relatively
accurate solution. The reason we approximated drag to be negligible was
because the net work done by the drag force was relatively small. Drag effects
the time of flight of the golf ball, which will cause values we calculated to be
slightly undershot. Hence, our method of approximation is meant to slightly
undershoot the green, as the rolling motion of the ball would then carry it
into the green. We therefore did not calculate the pressure drag (due to the
non-linearity of the differential equations for drag) and found the viscous
drag (which we could solve for analytically) to be very small.
For our club to ball interaction, we assumed a perfectly elastic collision,
which is not necessarily always the case, because the impulse delivered from
the club to the golf ball matters largely on the trajectory, however, it is
usually on the order of magnitude of thousandths or less. In essence, this is
a minor approximation that would barely affect the results, if at all.
The minimum total velocity, velocity angle on the xy plane, and x-axis offset
angle of the club head were computed to be 25.0577 m/s, 0.0151 radians,
and 0.4843 radians, respectively. The maximum total velocity, velocity angle
on the xy plane, and x-axis offset angle of the club head were computed to
10
Figure 8: Plot of the x-component of the club heads velocity versus the
y-component of the club heads velocity versus the offset angle of the club
heads x-axis for a shot to the left of the tree
This was the code used to find our values for the club and golf ball (MATLAB):
function [data, clubdata] = magnusgolf
% setting constants
ballrad = 2.1.*10.(-2);
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ro = 1.225;
A=.00138543;
ballm=.04593;
clubm = 270;
lang = .3316;
% spreads for omega k, total velocity, and angle
of shot for ball
w_k = linspace(0.1, 300, 100);
v_t = linspace(0, 80, 100);
theta = linspace(.4637, 1.4835, 100);
% output container for data
data = [];
% creating every combination of three spreads
for ind_w_k = 1:length(w_k)
for ind_v_t = 1:length(v_t)
for ind_theta = 1:length(theta)
% determining if velocity and theta
produce enough distance
% in x direction to reach green
if v_t(ind_v_t).*cos(theta(ind_theta))
>= sqrt((120.*9.8)./sin(2.*lang))
& v_t(ind_v_t).*cos(theta(ind_theta
)) <= sqrt((130.*9.8)./sin(2.*lang)
)
radius = (2.*ballm.*v_t(ind_v_t).*
cos(lang).*sin(theta(ind_theta)
).*cos(90-theta(ind_theta)))./(
ballrad.*w_k(ind_w_k).*ro.*A);
% determining if ball will fall
within green
if radius >= 60 & radius <= 65
% if it does, output data
datasing = [w_k(ind_w_k), v_t(
ind_v_t), theta(ind_theta)
];
data = [data; datasing];
end
end
end
end
end
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References
Ideal Lift of a Spinning Ball. Ideal Lift of a Spinning Ball. NASA, n.d.
Web. 15 Nov. 2015. www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/k-12/airplane/beach.html.
This was used to get some background about the Magnus Force, and Nasas
derivation of it for a spinning ball.
Equipment Rules. USGA: Guide to the Rules on Clubs and Balls.
USGA, n.d. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. www.usga.org/Rule-Books/Rules-onClubs-and-Balls/Appendix-III-%E2%80%93-The-Ball. This source was used
to get a background of golf and to find official information about ball dimensions.
ACTUAL LAUNCH CONDITIONS OVERALL DISTANCE AND SYMMETRY TEST PROCEDURE (PHASE II). United States Golf Association
and R&A Rules Limited (n.d.): n. pag. Usga.org. USGA, 28 Feb. 2011.
Web. 15 Nov. 2015. www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Equipment/
TPX3006-overall-distance-and-symmetry-test-procedure.pdf. This document
was used to get insight into how golf balls were tested and how the maximum
distance was calculated with experimental data.
2007, Colloquium Fluid Dynamics, and Institute Of Thermomechanics As
Cr, V. V. I., Prague, October 24 - 26, 2007. MAGNUS AND DRAG FORCES
ACTING ON GOLF BALL A. Kharlamov, Z. Chara, P. Vlasak Institute of
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