Breathing new life into old balls

Aimée Cubitt, a final year Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Bath, has developed a new device which ‘pumps air’ into tennis balls to extend their useful life and restores their bounce.

This is useful because tennis balls start to lose their bounce as soon as they are removed from their container as the pressurised air within their rubber core starts to seep out.

But there is currently no way for amateur players to reinvigorate their balls once they have gone flat, resulting in thousands of balls being thrown away each year and many amateur players using below-regulation balls.

As part of her final year project on the Innovation & Engineering Design course at the University of Bath, Aimée discovered that storing tennis balls in a pressurised container can help slow down pressure loss and even reverse it.

Her invention, which she has called ‘Pump‘n’Bounce’, incorporates a hand-operated pump with a tennis ball canister, allowing players to pressurise the container they store their tennis balls in.