ANSYS, the company that makes CFD (computational fluid dynamics) software FLUENT has an article in their promotional magazine on the development of the Speedo LZR. You can read the article for yourself here.
As I suspected Speedo utilized New Zealand's University of Otago for their water flume and NASA for use of a wind tunnel. The media likes to play up NASA's part though, which really casts shadows the real development effort behind the suits. Also, with all the suit controversy, many people need to understand that the only real controlled modeling that could be used for the suit development was of the body in the streamline position. All the drag benefits are maximized for that position because when a swimmer's moving arms and legs are brought into the equation things get very very complicated. Once a swimmer begins swimming, it can't be certain what is going on with the fluid flow. It will be interesting to see what sort of things can come about once people start tackling the modeling layout of the different strokes at different velocities. That could take a long time though, in the automotive world there are books of papers on the subject of modeling simple parts in CFD. Regardless, there may one day be a different suit for every stroke, that would make an IM suit very interesting...
1 comment:
Hi.
What about the Portuguese company (Petratex) where the thing is actually made and where a lot of development work was done to get the thing together?
Not a single line about them!!Speedo and a few others are pretending to pass the idea they did the all thing but it is obvious that the "swimmers" owe a great deal to that Petratex company as well.Or it is the case where big ones do the "works" on the small ones?
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