Modelling the Sound of a Golf Ball Impacting a Titanium Plate

A model was developed to predict the sound of a ball impacting a USGA CoR plate, as a first step towards simulating the acoustics of a ball/driver impact. A ball was dropped from 2.5 m onto a free-free plate with the impact sound recorded with a microphone. The experiment was replicated in Ansys/LS-DYNA, with both the exact Boundary Element Method and the Rayleigh method applied to predict the sound. The Rayleigh method predicted lower acoustic pressure than the Boundary Element Method, and was less accurate at predicting relative amplitudes of the frequency spectrum. The models under-predicted decay time, although, increasing mesh density improved agreement with the experiment. Further work should look to improve agreement between model and experiment for decay time, while investigating the effect of impact speed for a range of plate thicknesses.