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| Seen here are oilflow lines over the body colored by dynamic pressure. (Source: Barry Bixler and Speedo) |
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Key sport events such as the Winter Olympics held at the beginning of this year and the ongoing FIFA World Cup have become important drives for the research and development of new types of sportswear, and many sportswear companies are already forming new collections for the next sports celebration, the Olympics 2008.
In preparing for the event, Speedo, the world's leading swimwear brand, is now nurturing the next generation of its well-known Fastskin performance swimwear. In order to meet the competitive need, the company has decided to use supercomputing system for the making of enhanced version of Fastskin.
Most competitive swimmers, males and females, wear some type of full body suit that either covers wrists to ankles, or sleeveless, with torso and legs covered. Some prefer torso and a leg length to just above the knees. Speedo makes all the varieties and combinations, and amazing amounts of research go into the carefully designed fabrics and silhouettes of competitive swimwear.
At Speedo's Aqualab research and development facility, data of Olympic swimmers that wear body suits are processed by the performance-intensive Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program on an SGI Altix high-performance computing system offered by Silicone Technology.
Displaying water flows
The CFD modeling shows how the water flows around the body and the Fastskin material that resembles a shark's skin than human skin down to the tiny riblets (ridges) on the surface. In rerunning CFD models of previous Fastskin designs, the data will provide a background for designers to decide the best material and structure for the swimsuit, so that newer, also more hydrodynamic models that will further reduce high skin-friction drag can be created.
Meanwhile, the CFD analysis has already indicated that there is a more separated flow, where the water actually leaves the surface of the swimmer, for females than males, so the designs for male and female suits should be different.
Able to tackle different fluid flow problems
Barry Bixler, a key member of the Aqualab Research and Development Team and an aerospace engineer, said he is doing much more sophisticated analysis than ever before with the Fluent CFD program, which tackles a variety of fluid flow problems.
"We look at the speed [of the fluid flow] and the direction of the flow, and where it leaves the body, and where it reattaches itself. And of course we're always interested to see where the skin friction drag is high, and where it is low," he said.
And like many others, he believes that athletes can swim faster in the longer suits because the suits streamline the body and channel the flow around the body, reducing drag.
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