Kathleen DiSanto and I are interested in finding out what the displacemnet distribution is for an elastic sphere contacting a ridgid surface. This Problem has many applications in sports such as golf and baseball, where the golf club and the baseball bat can be seen as ridgid materials compared to the elastic golf ball or baseball.
We will tackle the problem by understanding the theory behind the static contact problem of a elastic sphere and a falt ridgid surface, compared it to a finite elemnet analysis in ABAQUS and then talk about how our model changes when for example golf is preformed.