ABSTRACT
Previous papers (Kawazoe, 1992; Kawazoe et al., 2002a, b; 2004) investigated the physical properties of the table tennis racket and the ball, and predicted the impact force, the contact time, the deformation of ball and rubber, the coefficient of restitution, the racket rebound power and the shock vibrations associated with the frontal impact when the impact velocity and the impact location on the racket face are given. It is based on the experimental identification of the dynamic characteristics of the ball-racket-arm system and an approximate nonlinear impact analysis. Also considered are the shock vibrations at the grip portion of the racket handle. The results showed that the rebound power coefficient decreases remarkably with increasing impact velocity. Although a player’s arm has a remarkable effect on the reduced mass of racket, it has almost no effect on the rebound ball velocity because the mass of a ball is too small compared to the mass of a racket itself.
