Effect of skirt angle and feathers formation on shuttlecock aerodynamics performance

Aerodynamic characteristics of badminton shuttlecock are significantly different from balls used in other sports. shuttlecock can achieve a very high initial speed and at the same time,it can decelerate very fast. this is due to the significant aerodynamic drag it experiences during its in-flight motion. a computational fluid dynamics (cfd) analysis was carried out to understand the aerodynamics of a feathers shuttlecock approved by badminton world federation (bwf) for international tournaments. the aerodynamics performance of a standard shuttlecock at steady-state flight was investigated. the shuttlecock was assumed to be rigid and have no spin rotation; and velocity considered was 92 m/s. effects of parameters such as angle of attack,α; angle of skirt,ɵ; and angle of feathers,β; on the shuttlecock drag coefficient,cd; were studied. it is found that smaller ɵ leads to smaller cd. analysis shows that the cd is the largest when the shuttlecock is at α = 0°. besides that,the cd is also influenced by β which the standard shuttlecock has fairly small cd. formation of feathers of the standard shuttlecock may be further twisted to the optimal value of β in order to increase its drag. as a result,ɵ and β may be considered as design parameters in order to obtain the desired aerodynamics performance. © 2015 penerbit utm press. all rights reserved.