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Company:	The Top-Flite Golf Company
Industry:	Sporting Goods
Application:	Golf Balls
MCAD System:	Autodesk Inventor

There is a lot of science behind the design of golf balls. Designing them to fly higher and go farther is a tricky task. Scientists at the Top-flite Golf Company are using CFdesign to better determine which new designs will go the distance.

Kevin Shannon, a research scientist at The Top-Flite Golf Company, says that while CFdesign was used initially to better visualize the ball while it was in flight, today they are using CFdesign early in the design process to determine which new designs will evolve into good balls.

In the past, the company's engineers would design each of the dimples on the ball and then send the design to the tooling room where a cavity would be created. The balls would then be molded from that cavity and flight tested to evaluate how the new design performed. "It wasn't until that point that we'd even know whether new geometry had any merit or not," says Shannon

While it might appear simple in shape, a golf ball is a very complex model. Each of the 300-500 dimples on the ball must be defined as an individual feature within the CAD model. Each of those dimples, or surfaces, presents themselves to the boundary condition of velocity of air coming at it. "The one wild card," adds Shannon, "is that we have a ball that is spinning and that also changes things, however, CFdesign is able to simulate that spin."

"We had a golf ball that performed terribly on the test range, so we decided to use the geometry from a good ball and the bad one to simulate both in CFdesign to see what the analysis could tell us about each one," says Shannon. "The results from CFdesign simulation were in very good agreement with what we saw on the test field."

By putting their new dimple designs through CFdesign simulations first, before tooling, the company has been able to save substantial money and time to market. "Now with CFdesign we can screen new dimple designs and get a good feeling for whether they have merit or not, while they are still on the drawing board," says Shannon. "Now CFdesign is the step we use before we go to the tooling room, which has helped us cut several prototypes out of the design process.