Bayer MaterialScience & adidas partner for FIFA World Cup ball
16 Mar '06
5 min read
Surface of the ball
"We spent three years working on this black, white and yellow ball. They were three years of outstanding teamwork, involving many other companies throughout the world." Materials research, design and production took place simultaneously on several continents. At the end of it all, the successful team achieved something that the former German International, Andreas Brehme, once described as: "Making the impossible possible is a sheer impossibility."
The surface of the adidas +Teamgeist consists of different layers, which together are responsible for the outstanding properties of the soccer ball, raging from a precise kicking behavior until a very small water uptake. For the manufacture of these layers the polyurethane raw material Impranil from Bayer MaterialScience is used.
At the beginning of the project, adidas drew up a clear list of detailed and demanding specifications. Michaelis: "With every new ball, adidas tells us exactly what it wants in terms of design and performance. This time the aim was to make the ball even rounder and to maintain its attractive appearance over a long time." But how round is round? Finding an answer to that question is not quite as easy as the former Hungarian International, Gyula Lorant, once put it: "The ball is round. If it had corners, it would be a cube."
Round is relative. The "+Teamgeist" is just one percent away from being a perfect sphere. This makes it particularly accurate as it travels through theair. It is all down to the materials used to make it and the innovative construction. For the first time, the adidas specialists have thrown out the familiar five and six-sided sections to which we have been accustomed over the last few decades and replaced them with propeller-shaped panels. They have also reduced the total number of sections from 32 to 14.
marketing@alchempro.com
