Enhancing skin-based interactions with rugby and soccer synthetic playing surfaces

The latest generation of synthetic surfaces include innovative design features that ensures player and ball behaviour closely replicates that observed on natural turf. This success has led to an increased up-take in synthetic surfaces across elite-level rugby and soccer providing high-quality, season-long playing conditions.

This PhD, sponsored by World Rugby and supported by FIFA, now seeks to advance the frictional characteristics of synthetic turf design. This project will first focus on characterising player-surface interactions that have caused skin abrasions, forming the most comprehensive knowledge and understanding of this complex, multi-parameter environment. The PhD student will then spend 6 months working at Sports Labs - a world-leader in pitch testing, to design and develop a new apparatus that will quantify synthetic turf friction. This new test device will then be used to investigate existing and emerging synthetic turfs, to identify those that exhibit the most favourable frictional characteristics, whilst retaining compliance with the Regulation 22 performance criteria.

Please visit here for application and funding details: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/projec...faces/?p104615 , or email me at TheobaldPS@Cardiff.ac.uk.