Development of an advanced finite element model of artificial turf

Engineering of Sport 15 - Proceedings from the 15th International Conference on the Engineering of Sport (ISEA 2024)

To better understand and improve artificial turf for American football, it is important to quantify turf-cleat interactions, using repeatable loading that represents in-game loads that elite level athletes experience, such as that provided by the Biocore Elite Athlete Shoe-surface Tester (BEAST). To gain insights into the important mechanisms at play during turf loading, a finite element model of a 3rd generation turf (including polypropylene slit-film fibers and a sand / rubber mixture infill) has been developed. A bottom-up approach has been used in which the constituent properties of the turf were characterized and implemented at the material level and using simple and well understood boundary conditions from BEAST tests to load the model.