Effects of long-pimples rubber for a table tennis racket on ball rebound behavior

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

Four types of rubber for a table tennis racket are classified according to the pimple structure: anti-rubber, pimples-in rubber, pimples-out rubber and long-pimples rubber. The array and structure of pimples has a great influence on the performance of the rubber. Among these types of rubber, the long-pimples rubber has different rebound behavior for the ball compared to the other rubbers due to the large deformation of the high pimples during impact, and is mainly used by players who are known as cutters. On the other hand, research on the long-pimples rubber tends to be less frequent than that on other rubbers because of the small number of players who user the long-pimples rubber. In response to this situation, it is expected that finite element (FE) analyses can be used to evaluate the performance of various rubbers and accumulate useful information for selecting rubbers. 

The objective of this study was to construct an FE model of the long-pimples rubber which can express the rebound behavior of the ball, and to investigate the effects of the pimple diameter on the rebound behavior of the ball. In this study, the commercial FE code ANSYS LS-DYNA (ver. 971, ANSYS Inc.) was used for the impact simulations.