ABSTRACT
Ball impact is of general interest in sports, and has been, for example, extensively studied in golf balls. In contrast to golf balls, where the only important impact occurs between ball and club, impacts of cricket balls extend to turf, bat, and protective apparel like face guards. Cricket balls are modelled either as a single spring-damper system (Carré et al., 2004) or using FEM (Subic et al., 2005). Developing a model for cricket balls from first principles is incredibly tedious considering its multi-tiered layered structure (Subic et al., 2005). Carré et al. (2004) studied the impact of a cricket ball on a rigid surface and developed an empirical model consisting of a Hertzian spring and a non-linear damper in parallel. Subic et al. (2005) performed compression testing in the Kookabura Tuf Pitch cricket ball at different deflection rates for FEA of face-guard designs, and found an exponential relationship between the loading velocity and the ball stiffness. Vikram & Fuss (2007) analysed stress relaxation as well as compression at 5 different deflection rates in five ball models, and found that the stress relaxation of cricket balls generally follows the power law.
