Soccer Ball Modelling

[Bernie]

Help!! I plan to model a soccer ball as part of a study into the dangers of heading but don't have a clue what material model to use for synthetic leather. Any advice would be greatly apprciated.

Bernie :D

[Jorgen]

Hello Bernie,

I suspect that the leather in the soccer ball is stressed mostly as a membrane and that the strains in the leather are relatively small in normal use. If so, I would use a simple hyperelastic or perhaps viscoelastic material model to capture the behavior of the synthetic leather.

The more tricky question is: how do you find the material parameters that go into either of these models :?:

Do you have any experimental data, or reference to experimental data, for synthetic soccer ball leather? If not, it should be rather simple to cut up a soccer ball and perform some tension tests!

Best of luck,
Jorgen

[Bernie]

Cheers for the advice, I do have some samples on which I plan to perform some tests.

keep up the good work and thanks again!