Drag Coefficients of Golf Balls

Eye injury from exploding golf balls.

Golf balls with liquid centres are liable to explode if damaged, and thus present a potential hazard to the eye. This injury was described by Duke-Elder (I954) who concluded ". . . Fortunately this hazard has now been removed from golf". In the past 5 years, however, several cases have been reported in the American literature (Johnson and Zimmerman, I 965; Penner, I 966; Slusher, Jaegers, and A...

Designing Hollow Nano Gold Golf Balls

Hollow/porous nanoparticles, including nanocarriers, nanoshells, and mesoporous materials have applications in catalysis, photonics, biosensing, and delivery of theranostic agents. Using a hierarchical template synthesis scheme, we have synthesized a nanocarrier mimicking a golf ball, consisting of (i) solid silica core with a pitted gold surface and (ii) a hollow/porous gold shell without sili...

On Playing Golf with Two Balls

We analyze and solve a game in which a player chooses which of several Markov chains to advance, with the object of minimizing the expected time (or cost) for one of the chains to reach a target state. The solution entails computing (in polynomial time) a function γ—a variety of “Gittins index”—on the states of the individual chains, the minimization of which produces an optimal strategy. It tu...

Aerodynamic drag of modern soccer balls

Soccer balls such as the Adidas Roteiro that have been used in soccer tournaments thus far had 32 pentagonal and hexagonal panels. Recently, the Adidas Teamgeist II and Adidas Jabulani, respectively having 14 and 8 panels, have been used at tournaments; the aerodynamic characteristics of these balls have not yet been verified. Now, the Adidas Tango 12, having 32 panels, has been developed for u...

Modeling Satellite Drag Coefficients With Response Surfaces