"Why Do" Wednesday - Why Do Golf Balls Have Dimples?

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If you are a golfer, you may know the answer to this, but many others may wonder.  Well, you are about to find out.  How many of us have ridden in a car or plane?  The same engineering theories that apply to drag and lift also apply to a golf ball.  So the simple answer to this question is having the dimples decrease drag and increase lift.  This allows the ball to travel farther.  A ball without them would only be able to travel half the distance.



This has nothing to do with dimples, but looks cool!

Drag
When an object is moving, it has a higher pressure on the front side.  Along with this, it also has turbulent area left behind as it disturbs the surrounding air while traveling through it.  These two things slow the object and create resistance.  So how do you fix this?  Well, in cars and airplanes they make them more aerodynamic.  In other words, they make it so the air passes over them with less resistance and disturbance to that surrounding air.  So instead of driving or flying a big square box, they are sleek rounded designs that reduce the disturbance behind the vehicle. Well, this applies to golf balls.

Those little dimples achieve this goal, by creating little pockets of disturbed air at each dimple.  This in turn forces the smoothly flowing air to follow the balls surface further behind the ball and that reduces the turbulent air behind the ball.  This cuts the drag in half.

Source: LiveScience


Lift
When we fly in a plane it is possible because of a thing called lift.  On airplanes, this is created by the wing shape.  It's flat on the bottom and curved on the top.  What this does is force the air under the wing to go faster than the air on top of the wing because it has to travel a shorter distance.  This in turn creates a force that pushes up on the wing and then the plane can fly.

For a golf ball the little dimples create this same effect.  Each of those dimples act as a wing and create a difference in air pressure causing lift, but that is only half the lift.  The other half comes from the ball spinning that creates a higher pressure on the bottom of the ball vs the top.  So between the dimples and the spinning, the ball soars like a plane!


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