Exam One

Dennis Chen
September 23, 2014
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a The object that I will be exploring for this question is a badminton racket. I will be looking at the
material properties of the plastic head of the racket.
Figure 1: A higher-end plastic badminton racket.
b The manufacturers description tell us that the head and handle of the racket are made from molded
ABS, and the shaft of the racket is made from tempered steel. ABS is a polymer.
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c Material properties were taken from matweb, where reported values for mechanical properties of ABS
were taken and averaged.
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Property Units/Scale Value
Hardness HRR 107
Youngs Modulus GPa 2.35
Yield Strength MPa 43.2
Flexural Strength MPa 67.5
Percent Elongation % 25.2
d Took a look at textbook pg. 482 for help on this one.
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http://www.amazon.com/Champion-Sports-Molded-Badminton-Racket/dp/B000KA4NV2/ref=sr 1 68?s=racquet-sports&ie=
UTF8&qid=1410385860&sr=1-68&keywords=badminton+racket
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http://www.matweb.com/search/DataSheet.aspx?MatGUID=eb7a78f5948d481c9493a67f0d089646&ckck=1
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e I chose to do calculations for a simple case where just the badminton racket head is cantilevered. This
may be a reasonable assumption because the ABS plastic is far more exible than the steel shaft of the
racket, so most of the bending should happen at the head. A load is applied at the end of the racket head,
and exural loading occurs.
f Quick googling tells us that the fastest badminton smash ever recorded went about 92 m/s. Lets assume
that a shuttlecock ies at half that speed in one direction and is returned at about the same speed since
few of us are Olympic badminton players. The change in momentum for a .005 kg shuttlecock is .46kgm/s.
If the racket stayed in contact with the shuttlecock for about .01 seconds, the shuttlecock and racket head
experienced a force of about 46N while they were in contact. A reasonable estimate for the maximum load
a badminton racket head could experience is about 50N.
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g The cross sectional area of the badminton racket head is not uniform, but lets assume its close enough
and that its about .0016m
2
.
h The calculation for stress at a certain point
l
2
along the length of the cantilevered beam of length l is:
S =
F
Z
(l
l
2
) (1)
,where Z is the section modulus of the cross section at that point. I made the very big assumption that
the section modulus of the cross section area can be approximated as the section modulus of a rectangular
block. Thus,
Z =
bh
2
6
=
(.08)(.02)
2
6
= 0.0000053m
3
. (2)
We can plug all our known values into the original equation to obtain the answer:
S = 1273584Pa = 1.27MPa (3)
i The deformation from the stress calculated is linear elastic, since the calculated stress is far less than
the yield strength of 43.2 MPa. This seems like a reasonable possibility despite the maybe unreasonable
assumptions about the section modulus. It makes sense that a shuttlecock cant deform a racket head no
matter how fast it is going, since a shuttlecock weighs almost nothing.
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