How Does Air Pressure Affect Curveball Distance in Different Ballparks?

[Alex Noel Cueto]

Hello everyone,

It's my first time posting, so I hope everyone is doing well. I am looking for some help for a high school research paper/lab I'm currently working on. Basically, I am investigating how the varying air pressures of different baseball parks have an effect on the distance traveled of a curve ball. As it is nearly impossible, nor worth the time, for me to actually vary air pressure in real life and get decently accurate data, I was looking to see if there are any computer based projectile simulators which I can use to mimic different ballpark environments. With that said, The simulator would have to have an ability to vary air pressure and measure the path the projectile moved while in the air. It would also need a way to set the rotation of the projectile so it could mimic the curve of a baseball. No worries if such a software doesn't exist; I'm ready to come up with plan B lol. Then again, any help would be awesome. apologies for the long message.

Thanks for all the help!

Alex

 

[CWatters]

I'm English so I'm not exactly familiar with baseball but have you tried googling for info. I found...

https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/K-12/airplane/foil2b.html

"With this software you can investigate how a big league pitcher throws a curveball by changing the values of the factors that affect the aerodynamic forces on the ball. These are the same forces that generate the lift of an aircraft wing. You can study aircraft wings with the FoilSim III software available at this site."

Also..
http://itg1.meteor.wisc.edu/wxwise/AckermanKnox/chap6/fly_ball.html
and..
http://baseball.physics.illinois.edu/Denver.html

 

[Alex Noel Cueto]

Awesome! Thank you so much. I guess using projectiles as my search criteria on google was a little to broad for what I wanted. I'll do some more hunting, but with what you gave me it should work well.

thanks again,

Alex