Abstract
A fundamental function of court sport shoes was considered as the protection of human feet from unexpected injuries. But, recently its role for improving the playing competency has been regarded as of more importance. In connection of this situation, intensive efforts are world-widely forced on the development of court sport shoes proving the excellent playing competency by taking kinesiology and biomechanics into consideration. However, the success of this goal depends definitely on the shoes design based upon the reliable evaluation of shoes functional parts. This paper addresses the application of finite element method to the evaluation of landing impact force of court sport shoes. In order to reflect the coupling effect between leg and shoes accurately and effectively, we construct a fully coupled shoes-leg FEM model which does not rely on the independent experimental data any more. Through the numerical experiments, we assess the reliability of the coupled FEM model by comparing with the experimental results and investigate the landing impact characteristics of court sport shoes.