Rebound Performance Evaluation of Rubber sheet for Table Tennis Racket

Abstract

The competition properties of a table tennis game are hitting the ball with a racket and bouncing to the court. The ball speed and spin influence the orbit of the ball and contribute to the game score. Following the fact that the diameter of the ball used in a competition was changed from 38 mm to 40 mm in 2000, the difference in the rebound performance based on the ball diameter was studied by some researchers. However, there are few studies about the performance evaluation of the rubber sheet for table tennis rackets. In this study, in order to evaluate the rebound performance of the commercial rubber sheets, repulsion speed and of spin rate are measured by the authors in the collision experiment using the table tennis machine. The performance of four rubber sheets was compared according to the catalogue specifications from two companies that made them. In addition, we experimented with changing the ball speed from 20 to 70 km/h and the spin rate from 0 to 4300 rpm by the machine. From the experiment results, it was found that the coefficients of restitution in all rubber sheets decrease as the incidence ball speed is faster. Also, the coefficient of restitution was influenced by the racket angle (incidence angle). The speed and spin rate in the two types of rubber sheets had the same rebound performance values in these catalogue specifications, whereas other types of rubber sheets were different from those in the catalogue.