golfball drag coefficient

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thschrader
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golfball drag coefficient

Post by thschrader »

Motivation:
https://forum.freecadweb.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=32285

Golfball: diameter 45 mm, weight 40 gramms, gives a free-fall speed of 130 km/h (at cf=0,3).
At 130 km/h I get a force of 0,6 N, wich gives a drag-coefficient of 0,49.
Seems a little bit to high. Maybe the dimples are to rough. Or the mesh. Or both.

I ran a laminar steady-state simulation (Re=105000), because cfmesh puts the boundary-elements on a wrong face.
The elements are put at one side of the cube, not at the golfball. Cant figure out why.
Thats the real stuff for a rainy sunday...
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chrisb
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Re: golfball drag coefficient

Post by chrisb »

Thanks for sharing this. It would be great if you can provide the same for pure sphere of the same diameter.
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thschrader
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Joined: Sat May 20, 2017 12:06 pm
Location: Germany

Re: golfball drag coefficient

Post by thschrader »

The golfball travels at speeds between 250 (start) and 100 kmh (free-fall),
For a 45 mm ball the Re-numbers are between 100000-200000.
At Re=100000 a smooth sphere has a drag-coefficient of 0,5.
At Re=200000 the drag-coefficient begins to drop down due to flow change from laminar to turbulent.
For rough balls, the flow change happens at much lower Re-numbers (=speed).
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/airpl ... phere.html
https://www.mne.psu.edu/cimbala/me325we ... /intro.pdf

@chris:
I ran a simulation for a smooth sphere (laminar flow, drag-coeffient should be around 0,5 at
Re=100000), but I got a drag of only 0,04, which is obviously wrong.
Here is a nice tutorial, I will try to do that with FC first.
https://mycourses.aalto.fi/pluginfile.p ... enfoam.pdf
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UR_
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Re: golfball drag coefficient

Post by UR_ »

A comparative study of golf ball aerodynamics.png
A comparative study of golf ball aerodynamics.png (45.09 KiB) Viewed 2510 times

That's from here: https://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/imaru ... _Paper.pdf :roll:
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