Is Artificial Grass Better than the Real Thing?

When I think of artificial grass, I imagine the cheap, brittle plastic kind. Clearly fake. So when I first started hearing about its spring and sliding resistance capabilities, I was skeptical. I was even more surprised when it appeared in one of my Google alerts. Yes, it seems that artificial grass is “in” this year and even making the news.

According to a recent article in the Bucks County Courier Times, artificial grass is helping at least one community save money. The Yardley-Makefield Soccer Organization has installed an artificial-turf soccer field in Lower Makefield that will save the township $3,000-$4,000 annually in maintenance costs and won’t need to be replaced until after 12 years. That’s right, no more planting, fertilizing, watering, or mowing for over a decade!

Roger Deininger, the president of Yardley-Makefied Soccer Organization, explained that one of the driving reasons for switching from real to artificial grass was due to practices. “We have 52 travel teams practicing twice a week in 90-minute sessions and we were just killing the grass fields, absolutely beating them up. They were getting so much use and hardly any rest, and that doesn’t matter on the turf field.”

Deininger also stated that the artificial turf gives more than grass, has been chemically treated to prevent cut and scraped athletes from getting infections, and was tested by an independent lab that assures it meets federal standards for lead content.

Ok, great. But how can we be sure that the stuff behaves like real grass? This is what matters to the athletes and spectators after all!

Royal TenCate, the company supplying artificial turf on which the Olympic field hockey matches will be played in Beijing, works with engineers at Dutch design company Reden to ensure their artificial grass is up to Olympic standards. “A top-shape grass field has certain attributes like spring, sliding resistance, damping, energy restitution, and so forth,” says Reden Managing Director Marco Ezendam, MSc. His team uses special devices to measure these characteristics in a real field and then works to duplicate them in an artificial one. “To achieve our goal, we need a detailed model of an artificial grass system, which is where FEA is essential,” he says.

FEA isn’t another athletic association; it’s a brainy thing and stands for finite element analysis. By creating a computer model that is a 3D mathematical representation of an object, designers and engineers can input different shapes, materials, and forces to see how their “virtual” shoe, or soccer ball, or blade of plastic grass will function when it moves, bounces, or gets crushed by a foot or a ball. They can test different versions of the design to see which combination of factors gives the best performance, and then send precise build instructions to manufacturing.

Reden engineers use FEA to first model the top (“sport technical”) layer of artificial turf, then simulate its fibers, infill, sand and backing. They test their models under various stresses, including the impact of a ball, and also a “virtual artificial athlete” that duplicates the effects of an actual player during a game. Model test results are compared against those from real fields and the results are used to fine-tune the components of the artificial product. When the final results are compared against the behavior of real grass, it’s a close match, indeed.

Are you convinced? I am. Although I’ve never played on artificial grass, the scientific testing is enough proof for me. And if artificial turf is good enough for Olympic field hockey players and Yardley-Makefield Soccer players, I’d say the FEA realistic simulation must be working just fine. My only question is when will artificial grass smell like the real thing?

–Kate

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