Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

Determination Of Drag And Lift Coefficients For A Spinning Baseball, M. B. Parekh

Theses and Dissertations

Few experiments have been carried out in the past to deter mine the effect of the lift and the drag forces on the trajectory of a ball used in any game. In a baseball game, it was reported that sometimes the ball took a sharp turn aburptly in the region of 15 to 20 feet from the home plate. This indicated a sudden change of the forces acting on the ball. The principal forces acting w ere as fol lows: 1. Weight of the ball. 2. Drag force acting in the direction parallel to the relative wind. 3. Lift force …