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- Title
Measuring Hydrodynamic Drag of Swimsuits Using Acoustic Doppler Velocimetry.
- Authors
Sumali, Anita X.; Chaulagain, Smriti; Sumali, Mario F.; Stone, Mark C.
- Abstract
Some scientific publications (e.g., Luo et al., 2015) mention that expensive Fastskin swimsuits have a special texture to lower hydrodynamic drag and give an advantage in swimming competitions. Our research attempted to investigate that claim. In particular, we measured the skin drag (part of the total passive drag) of different swimsuits using an experimental flume and an Acoustic Doppler Velocimeter (ADV). In the boundary layer, downstream velocity was measured at several distances from the swimsuit surface. The resulting plot of velocity versus distance was curve-fit with an exponential function that decays towards the free-flow velocity as distance increases. From the decay exponent, a metric of drag (proportional to the shear stress on the swimsuit surface) was derived to characterize the skin drag of the swimsuit. Finally, the metric was plotted against the prices of the swimsuits. The result indicates that a more expensive swimsuit does not necessarily give less skin drag than a less expensive swimsuit. We discovered that velocity readings from the ADV near the boundary is biased, and explain that the bias applies consistently to all the swimsuits we tested. Therefore, our conclusion is not affected by the bias.
- Subjects
DOPPLER velocimetry; BATHING suits; SWIMMING competitions; BOUNDARY layer (Aerodynamics); SHEARING force; DRAG reduction
- Publication
New Mexico Journal of Science, 2020, Vol 54, Issue 1, p36
- ISSN
0270-3017
- Publication type
Article