The Magnus effect and the American football Christian Guzman, Cody Brownell & Eric M. Kommer Sports Engineering ISSN 1369-7072 Volume 19 Number 1 Sports Eng (2016) 19:13-20 DOI 10.1007/s12283-015-0184-4 1 23 Your article is protected by copyright and all rights are held exclusively by International Sports Engineering Association. This e- offprint is for personal use only and shall not be self-archived in electronic repositories. If you wish to self-archive your article, please use the accepted manuscript version for posting on your own website. You may further deposit the accepted manuscript version in any repository, provided it is only made publicly available 12 months after official publication or later and provided acknowledgement is given to the original source of publication and a link is inserted to the published article on Springer's website. The link must be accompanied by the following text: "The final publication is available at link.springer.com”. 1 23 Author's personal copy Sports Eng (2016) 19:13–20 DOI 10.1007/s12283-015-0184-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE The Magnus effect and the American football 1 2 1 Christian Guzman • Cody Brownell • Eric M. Kommer Published online: 25 September 2015 Ó International Sports Engineering Association 2015 Abstract The aerodynamics of an American NFL foot- a symmetric body due only to the rotation of the object. ball during an end over end kick were investigated utilizing This lateral force is more commonly described as a lift a custom rotating apparatus and large-scale wind tunnel. force, and is due to the rotation of the object dragging the Non-rotating lift and drag coefficients were measured and fluid boundary layer in the direction of rotation, modifying agree well with previous data from other athletic balls and the pressure distribution and imparting a net force on the a smooth sphere. The rotation effect on an American object. football increased both the lift and drag coefficients more The Magnus effect has been extensively studied over the dramatically than what has been seen with symmetrical last century by researchers with objects of many shapes and objects over a wide range of rotational rates. The results sizes. Lift and drag coefficients of sports balls with rotation from this study can be used to more accurately predict the have been measured via a variety of methods. In baseball, flight trajectory of an end over end kick, and help optimize the laces on the ball allow the Magnus effect to be the balance between kick velocity and rotational speed for amplified greatly, leading to the ability of pitchers to throw a given kicker’s leg strength. a variety of pitches, normally termed breaking balls, such as a slider, curveball, or sinker [3–5]. The curvature of Keywords Aerodynamics Á American football Á Magnus soccer corner kicks has been evaluated using high speed effect Á Rotational velocity Á Kick Á Drag visualization to determine the effect of rotation speed [6, 7]. Wind tunnel testing to determine the lift and drag coefficients of non-rotating soccer balls has been per- 1 Background formed with full scale balls [8–11]. Investigation into Australian rules football and rugby balls is also found in The curvature of trajectory on a spinning ball has been the literature [12]. observed and commented on as early as 1671 by Sir Issac With respect to American footballs, wind tunnel testing Newton [1] and is commonly referred to the Magnus (or has been performed to determine drag coefficients of non- sometimes Robins) effect, after Dr. Heinrich Magnus, who rotating balls [13]. Scale testing has been performed on qualitatively described the phenomenon in 1928 [2]. Tennis footballs spinning along the longitudinal axis, as in a spiral slices, baseball curveballs, and golf hooks are all outcomes throw [14]. A number of purely kinematic studies on of the Magnus effect in which a lateral force is imparted on American footballs have been published which attempt to quantify either the stabilizing effect of a spiral or the oscillation of the drag and lift force due to rotation [15–18]. & Eric M. Kommer Simulations and/or computations of ball flight have often [email protected] used lift and drag coefficients calculated on a non-rotating 1 The Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Ave NE, ball. Past research on smooth spheres shows that as rota- Washington, DC 20064, USA tional speed increases, lift and drag coefficients can vary 2 United States Naval Academy, 590 Holloway Rd, Annapolis, drastically. MD 21402, USA Author's personal copy 14 C. Guzman et al. Nowhere in the literature has the Magnus effect been where x is the rotational velocity in radians per second, quantified for an American football with end-over-end and D is the diameter. For non-symmetrical shapes, the rotation. The football is especially interesting because diameter can be chosen as any appropriate length scale. In during end over end rotation, such as seen during kickoffs, this study, the diameter is chosen to be the length of the the ball’s front projected area changes dramatically and due football along the long axis. This non-dimensional velocity to the presence of the laces it is asymmetric. Surface reaches unity when the mean flow field velocity is equal to roughness and seams also add to the complexities of the the linear velocity of the spinning surface. At small values flow, so that Magnus effect predictions extrapolated from of a, the Magnus effect vanishes for symmetric objects. In smooth sphere data are not expected to be accurate. general, as a increases, both the lift and drag coefficients Accurate predictions of the lift and drag on a football increase to some limiting value. The relative magnitudes of with respect to velocity and rotational speed can help inertial to viscous forces subjected on the object due to the predict the actual trajectory of the kick and help optimize flow field are represented as the Reynolds number: the best rotation speed for a given kick. The aims of this VDq work are to accurately quantify the effects of rotation on Re ¼ ; ð5Þ l the uniquely shaped football as a means for researchers, trainers, and athletes to better understand the physics of where l is the dynamic viscosity of the fluid in the flow football flight. field. In general, the lift and drag coefficients of an object are independent of flow velocity and Reynolds number above a critical value of the Reynolds number that ensures 2 Theory wholly turbulent flow over the object. Research has shown that the Magnus effect forces often do depend upon Rey- To accurately predict the trajectory of ball in flight, the nolds number but not to a large degree [19]. initial position and velocity must be known to solve the kinematic equations. From Newton’s second law of motion in vector form, 3 Experimental apparatus ox2 RF ¼ m ; ð1Þ A full-sized National Football League official football was o2 t rotated about its transverse axis via an aluminum support where F is the force vector acting on the body, m is the structure and steel axle. The 6.35-mm-diameter steel axle mass of the ball, t is time, and x is the position vector. The was isolated via ball bearings and coupled to a NMEA 14 forces acting on the ball when in flight other than due to sized bipolar stepper motor. Coupling between the steel gravity are aerodynamic drag and lift where axles and the ball was accomplished using ground down T-nuts threaded onto the end of the axles. The aluminum 1 2 FL ¼ CL qAV ð2Þ structure made of 6.35-mm-thick 6061 alloy was assem- 2 bled using threaded fasteners. The completed structure, 1 2 FD ¼ CD qAV ; ð3Þ shown in Fig. 1, was designed to minimize the blockage 2 area in the wind tunnel to prevent accelerating the flow at where CL and CD are the lift and drag coefficients, q is the the test section. All parts of the structure, except where the fluid density, and V is the velocity of the bulk fluid moving axles intersect the ball, were distant from the boundary past the object. The area, A, is calculated based on the layer on the ball to prevent affecting the flow field. frontal projected area of the ball normal to the direction of The AeroLab Eiffel open circuit wind tunnel in the US fluid flow. Naval Academy’s aerospace engineering laboratory was If the lift and drag coefficients are known, the solution to used to conduct the testing on the apparatus. The Eiffel the ball trajectory becomes a second order non-linear dif- wind tunnel is capable of velocities up to 112 m/s and is ferential equation that can be easily solved numerically. powered by a 185 kW three-phase fan and variable fre- For most objects, the lift and drag coefficients are constant quency drive. The lift and drag forces are measured using a over a wide range of velocities, as long as the fundamental pyramidal 6 axis force balance with an accuracy of 0.25 % flow structure does not change. In most cases the flow of the full scale. This equates to a rated precision of 5 N for through air is fully turbulent. For rotating bodies, a non- lift and 1.3 N for the drag force. Measurements below the dimensional rotational velocity, a, is introduced: precision of the balance are possible but may not be xD accurate. Data acquisition was accomplished utilizing a a ¼ ; ð4Þ 2V desktop computer and a National Instruments NI SCXI- 1314 analog to digital conversion module.