1. Introduction. Brief description of the project.
In some ways tennis has become a truly high tech sport. Advances in racket
design and composition have changed the speed of the game from the days of
wooden frames, and made the game easier and more enjoyable at the recreational
Television coverage of matches makes use of sophisticated statistical analysis to
explain the outcome of matches in terms of winners, errors, serving percentages and
ball placement Players study the statistical tendencies of opponents in an effort to get
But at the most basic level of understanding there is no clear picture of what
happens to the tennis ball during the course of a tennis match. The radar guns give us
an initial velocity of the serves, but beyond that very little is really known about what
happens, when players strike the ball in the game. New types of strikes result in
complicated rotation of the ball. For example:
Increasing service speed of ball shooting
Top spin resulting in maximum upper rotation
Slice resulting in simultaneous bottom and side rotation
Tennis rackets nowadays need to be constantly re-developed. Design and
manufacturing procedures linked with the most essential equipment a tennis player
can have, are subjected to aerodynamical change. This book seeks to study tennis
from a new perspective – the perspective of design aerodynamics, setting out to
determine what we can learn about the flight of the tennis ball. When the ball hits the
racket during play, some dynamic stresses and deformations occur with the load
periodically changing [1]. This results in oscillations (vibrations) in the racket and
under certain conditions the phenomenon “resonance” might occur during which the
stress and deformations might suddenly rise to dangerous values. When no
resonance conditions exist the periodically changing stress might lead to damages in
the racket caused by gradually forming cracks in the material [1].
2. Project Identification and Definition
The wider popularity of tennis as a sport game on a world-wide scale, the
