The influence of turbulence in ball games

International audienceThis chapter presents recent experimental results on the possible influence of surrounding turbulence in the practice of ball sports. The focus is put on the question of the increased or decreased interest of such sports (in the sense of the richness of the possible dynamical features a player can impart to the ball) in turbulent conditions compared to the laminar case. To this end, we investigate the Lagrangian trajectory of spheres towed in laminar and turbulent flows. Although this situation is not identical to that of a kicked or pitched ball, we show that it shares at least some of the fluid-structure interaction features at the origin of the richness of ball games. The trajectories of the spheres are investigated in terms of statistical and dynamical properties of the position of the sphere. Our study shows that turbulence mainly tends to smear out the possible subtle effects that talented players may provide to the ball trajectory in laminar conditions