Research Paper On A Tennis Racquet

A tennis racquet has a sweet spot. If a ball touches with the sweet spot, the force spread to the hand is so small that the player is almost unaware that the impact has happened. If the ball touches at a point away from the sweet spot, the player will feel some vibration in the handle. The sweet spot is a vibration; it is near the center of the racquet. Another potential sweet spot is the center of percussion.
A racquet acts as if it’s a uniform beam in this respect, despite the round head, since the center of mass of a racquet is near the center of the racquet. One node is near the center of the strings, and the other node is in the handle of the racquet. It is easy to hear the vibration if you hold the handle lightly at the node, with the …show more content…
What happens in actual play is hard to predict, but a good test is to drop a ball onto the strings when the head is clamped (e.g. by placing the racquet on the floor and stepping on the handle near the head). When dropped from a height of say 1 meter, the ball will bounce to a height of about 0.70 meter. The ball loses about 45% of its energy when dropped on concrete, but it loses only 30% of its energy when dropped on the strings. That's because the strings absorb some of the impact energy and then give almost all of that back to the ball. The amount of energy lost by the ball depends on its compression. When dropped from 100 inches on concrete, it compresses by about 6 mm. When dropped on the strings, it compresses by about 3 mm. The bigger the compression, the more energy is lost when the ball expands back to its original shape. That means that at high impact speeds, where the ball compresses more, the energy loss is even greater. Furthermore, the fraction of the ball's energy that is lost also increases as the ball's energy is increased or as the compression is …show more content…
The spin direction must be reversed to achieve this result. Two QuickTime movie files are attached showing how this is done, one by myself and one by Federer. The physics of each shot is the same, the only real difference being that Federer has a more elegant style. The film of Federer was taken at about 1000 frames/sec judging by the fact that the ball sits on the strings for about 5ms and is seen for 4 or 5 frames on the

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