Simulation Week

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Week 3 of my Senior Project Journey!

This week I embark on the second phase of my project where I do simulations to establish a controlled constant of how the soccer moves. It took me a while to figure out the experimental parameters and how to use the applet. I eventually got used to the applet and could do my simulation.

My simulation consisted of kicking from the penalty spot, corners, and a free kick outside the penalty box. These were the only places I could simulate a kick from. As for the experiment itself, I used 3 different speeds for kicking: 49, 59, 69mph. For some weird reason, the applet couldn’t round up to 10s. But that is what happens when you are using a 14-year-old, hardly updated site to run simulations on. On each speed, I adjusted the spin rate by the 100s, so see how much the soccer ball can fly off a straight line with the amount of spin. I had spin rates of 0, 100, 200, 300, and 400rpm. This meant there were 37 simulations required and this process has been completed.

So here were the inputs and now we need outputs. For outputs, the simulator had no measurable output. So as a solution, I will scale the net to what a real-life size net is. I then will measure the distance between where the ball landed in the net and the post of the soccer net. I obviously will scale it up, which will allow me to know the distance the ball drifted from the centerline of where the ball was kicked. 

The simulation part came and went very quickly and now it is onto planning my physical experiment. See you next week!