Academic literature on the topic 'Baseball equipment performance'

“With a lighter but stiffer shaft and heavier clubhead the ball goes farther. Easier,” claims a 1975 advertisement for Shakespeare graphite irons. New materials such as graphite, boron, and titanium, have made sports equipment stronger yet lighter and thus more powerful. For athletes, sports have become, as the ad stated, easier. Serves over one hundred miles per hour are commonplace on the professional tennis tour, and athletes such as Tiger Woods are making par five golf holes obsolete. Sports organizations do not, however, always embrace these innovations that facilitate play. Major League Baseball retains its traditional mandate requiring only wood bats, the International Tennis Federation prohibited double strung tennis rackets, and the United States Golf Association banned asymmetrically dimpled golf balls. These technology regulations emerged to prevent the sport from becoming “easier,” protecting sport integrity.

Sports engineering uses mathematics and physics to develop solutions to sporting problems. It involves the design and manufacture of sports equipment and facilities that can help maximise athletic performance. In order to develop fit-for-purpose products, it is necessary to consider the motions and movements of athletes. Professor Shinobu Sakai, Production Systems Engineering and Sciences, Komatsu University, Japan, is combining AI and neural networks (NN) to develop multifunctional and high-performance sports equipment and training machines that can benefit athletes and people across the globe who play sports. Believing that machines are subordinate to human beings, a key goal for Sakai is to augment the performance of sports players through the development of tools and machines. Some of the state-of-the-art tools and methodologies he uses in his work are high-resolution sensors, laser-speed sensors, MATLAB and general finite element method analysis software (ANSYS/LS-DYNA). He has developed a shuttlecock launching machine for badminton that can launch at high speed, a high-performance baseball pitching machine that is able to generate an efficient and objective gyro spin and has a high throwing performance and a pitching control method that uses AI.

This article describes the equipment and technology advances in baseball and softball games. Research efforts are currently being pursued by the authors to develop a layer-by-layer finite element model of a baseball. While work on improved ball models is ongoing, a number of significant accomplishments have been made with current models. These include comparing bat performance, describing the plastic deformation (denting) observed in metal bats, and the failure modes observed with wood bats. To simulate the bat/ball impact at game-like speeds, a durability machine is used to fire balls at a bat at speeds up to 200 mph, at the rate of 10 per minute. After a ball is shot, it falls into a trough and is loaded back into the magazine, which holds up to 36 balls. The bat-support mechanism simulates the grip and flexibility of a batter and can be programmed to rotate the bat between hits to simulate the use of hollow bats or to remain “label up” as is needed for wood bats.

High performance network over coax (HINOC) is a recently proposed technology which plays a central role in the integration of telecommunications networks, cable TV networks and the Internet. But there still is a lack of comprehensive testing equipment designed for it yet, especially in baseband signal testing area. In this paper, we designed a high performance baseband signal transmitter and analyzer for HINOC system test. The system is implemented as hardware and software co-design architecture. Both of the baseband signal transmitter and analyzer have passed a series of rigorous tests, which demonstrates that the whole system meets the HINOC test specification and can provide great assistance for follow-up HINOC research.

The rapid development of mobile communications and the continuous growth of service needs lead to an increase in the number of base stations (BSs). Through virtualization and cloud technology, virtual Baseband Units (BBUs) are deployed on a virtual machine (VM) to build a BBU pool to achieve hardware resource sharing, which not only saves BS construction costs but also facilitates management and control. However, too high or too low server resource utilization in the pool not only affects the performance of the virtual BBU but also increases the maintenance cost of the physical equipment. In this paper, BBUs are virtualized to construct a virtual BBU pool based on the OpenStack cloud architecture and a dual threshold adaptive dynamic migration strategy is proposed in this scenario. Establish upper and lower threshold of resource utilization of the servers in the pool and the strategy determines whether the dynamic migration is triggered according to the resource utilization of each compute node. If the migration is triggered, the strategy selects the virtual resource to be moved out and the target node to realize the dynamic migration to achieve the purpose of balancing the server load and saving energy consumption. The migration strategy proposed in this paper is simulated on Cloudsim and the experimental results show that the strategy can effectively reduce the number of migrations and migration time on the basis of reducing energy consumption and SLA violations. This paper successfully deployed the strategy on the OpenStack platform, which implements dynamic migration autonomously to save the overall energy consumption of the BBU pool, instead of manual operations.

This Reports Forensic Engineering Analysis Of Impacts To The Adult Head And Pediatric Head From Multiple Sources, With The Goal Of Amassing A Database To Be Utilized For Forensic Biomedical Engineering Analysis. Supplemental Impact Activities (Of Acceleration Verses Time Data), Rather Than Cumulative Historical Adult And Child Head Impacts Are Discussed. Adult Head Impacts Recently Tested Include Motorcycle, Bicycle And Equestrian Helmeted Impacts. Infant Head Impacts Include Falls Onto Carpet/Tile And Toy Impacts, And Child Head Impacts Include Recreational Ball Tests (Baseballs, Soccer Balls, Playground Balls And Basketballs). Biomedical Engineers Use Computational Modeling And Simulation To Analyze Injurious Trauma To The Human Head And Brain. The Verification Of These Mathematical Models, Codes, Solutions, And/Or Simulations Depends Upon The Quality Of Their Experimental Validation. The Reliability Of The Experimental Data Determines The Validity Of The Modeling. A Database Of Real World Head And Brain Impact Responses Is Constructed Utilizing Principals From Biomedical Engineering, Biomechanics And Anthropometric Dummy Testing. The Digital Data Is Collected According To A Standardized Protocol Using A Tri-Axial Accelerometer Mounted Inside Of Various Anthropometric Dummy Craniums Of Infants, Children And Adults. The Performance Of Motorcycle, Bicycle And Equestrian Helmet Types Is Analyzed With Some Unexpected Results. Other Data Includes Pediatric Experimental Results That Have Not Been Previously Reported: Child Head Impacts With Various Sports Equipment, Infant Head Impacts To Surfaces Commonly In The Home, Like Tile And Carpet, As Well As Infant Head Impacts With Massive, Hard Plastic Toys. The Objective Is To Quantify The Pediatric And Adult Human Head Responses In The Form Of Acceleration Verses Time Data To Impact And Non-Impact Scenarios. This Data Will Supplement The Forensic Engineering Experimental Analysis Database As Well As Define Variables Utilized In The Mathematical Modeling Of Injurious Head Impacts To Improve Head Impact Safety Counter Measures.

[Formulae and special characters can only be approximated here. Please see the pdf version of the abstract for an accurate reproduction.] Ball-impact injuries in baseball, while relatively rare, have the potential to be catastrophic. These injuries are primarily attributed to impact by the ball after it has been hit, pitched or thrown. As the closest infielder to the hitter, the pitcher is at greatest risk of being struck by the batted ball. This thesis investigated the influence of bat and ball design on ball exit velocity (BEV) and the potential for impact injury to pitchers. Finite element analysis (FEA) was used to quantify the dynamics of bat-ball impact for bats of various moment of inertia and baseballs with different mechanical properties. The analysis was conducted using ANSYS/LSDYNA explicit dynamics software. To replicate a typical bat-ball impact in the field, the model required input of bat linear and angular velocity and orientation in three-dimensional (3-D) space, at the instant prior to impact. This data was obtained from 3-D kinematic analysis using two high-speed video cameras operating at 200 Hz. Seventeen high-performance batters used a wood bat and a metal bat of equal length and mass to hit baseballs thrown by a pitcher. Hitters developed significantly higher resultant linear velocity for both the proximal (38.3 ± 1.8 ms-1;) and distal (8.1 ± 1.8 ms-1) ends of the metal bat (compared with 36.4 ± 1.7 ms-1 and 6.9 ± 2.1 ms-1 respectively for the wood bat). They also achieved a significantly more “square” bat position just prior to impact with the ball (264.3 ± 9.1 deg compared with 251.5 ± 10.4 deg). These factors are important in transferring momentum to the batted ball. Mathematical description of the large-deformation material behaviour of the baseball was also required for this analysis. Previous research is limited to compression tests to 10 % of ball diameter, despite conjecture that during impact with the bat, the ball might deform to 50 % of its original diameter. Uniaxial quasi-static compression tests on seven models of baseballs investigated baseball behaviour during deformation to 50 % of ball diameter. The resulting force-displacement relationship was highly non-linear. Hence FEA was used to derive and verify a relationship to describe the time-dependent and elastic behaviour of the ball during the 1 ms period typical of bat-ball impact. The results of the bat-ball impact analysis indicated that for hits made at the point of maximum momentum transfer on the bat, the metal bat produced greater BEV than the wood bat (61.5 ms-1 and 50.9 ms-1 respectively). The higher BEV from the metal bat was attributed to greater pre-impact bat linear velocity, and bat orientation during impact. The more perpendicular horizontal orientation of the metal bat at the instant of impact resulted in a greater proportion of resultant BEV being directed in the global x-direction (toward the pitcher), compared with the wood bat. This indicates increasing bat moment of inertia (the relative mass of the bat barrel) may be a potential control strategy for BEV. BEV was also reduced for impacts using a baseball with values for instantaneous shear and relaxed modulii approximately 33 % less (9.9 % reduction in BEV for metal bat, 9.7 % for the wood bat).