Why is there fuzz on a tennis ball?

Question

Why is there fuzz on a tennis ball?

Answer 1

For better contact against the strings resulting in more control of the ball. You can spin the ball better with fuzz than without. Also maybe to slow it down just a bit for better play. Ever tried playing tennis with a racquet ball?

lol andrea straight up ripped off her post from here:

http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/62212

Answer 2

Hi: First, just a dabble in the history of tennis balls.  Early days tennis balls were mostly made of leather stuffed with hair, cloth or wool--I use the term 'mostly' because variations exist.  By the late 1870s, the game of tennis was developed and made more official with the birth of "Lawn tennis".  Rubber was then used to make the balls for the lawn tennis.

Now, the meat of the answer.  The international tennis federation (ITF) stated that "originally tennis balls were made solely of rubber, but the wearing and playing properties of the balls were improved by covering them with flannel stitiched around the rubber core".  I believe this, using flannel, was the earliest version of the fuzz we see in the modern tennis balls.  However, it is not quite clear whether the flannel was used to improve the playability first and the wearability is just the resulting benefit or the other way around.  Personally, I suspect that it was used more to improve the wearability of the ball than the playability.

The greenish-yellow fuzz, also referred to as 'felt', on the modern tennis ball is an evolved version of the early flannel.  It is still made from wool but with more chemical additives.  The felt of the ball has become even more significant to the way the modern game is played that different grades of felt are manufactured for different court types.  'Extra duty' felt, which is tougher to wear out, are usually reserved for hard courts while 'regular felt' are favored on clay.

Advanced players will also tell you that the felt grips the string of the racket and enable them to produce more spin.  More [top]spin enables a player to hit the ball harder and still have it land inside the court.  This is probably true, but keep in mind that the felt also slows the ball down--which is the reason why you see the touring pros choose the least fluffy balls to serve (they get three balls from the ballperson and then keep only one and discard the others back to the ballperson).

Answer 3

The fuzz, more properly called felt, is usually made of wool treated with various additives to make it last longer and resist staining.

http://tennis.about.com/od/tennisballfaq...

The tennis ball cover is rough but not like sandpaper. Looking closely at the felt you can see that air flows through those raised fabric filaments - better known as fuzz. So the surface of a tennis ball is a "porous surface." It's more like dealing with the wind blowing through leaves on a tree and just as complicated. The fuzz filaments act like tiny cylinders each having their own drag component. In addition to the skin friction drag from the cover itself, drag is created from the airflow over these fuzz fibers interacting with all the other fibers behind it. Rabi Mehta dubbed this phenomenon "fuzz drag."

Experiments Mehta conducted also showed that as the ball speed increases the fuzz filaments lay down on the ball and the fuzz drag declines. Here are two pictures from the wind tunnel test. You can see in the picture on the right that the fuzz is closer to the ball's surface. The air passing over the ball on the left is about 45 mph, while on the ball on the right the air is 135 mph.

http://www.tennisserver.com/set/set_01_1...

Researcher Rabi Mehta, working with students, discovered that the "fuzz" on a tennis ball created more drag than was previously believed, since each individual fuzz filament contributes to drag. In addition, he found that fuzz drag is particularly interesting since the fuzz filaments can change orientation during play and gradually wear off.

http://www.nasaexplores.com/show2_articl...