David Curtis

Olympians look to physics

The Olympic motto of citius, altius, fortius – swifter, higher, stronger – is as true of the games now as it was when the Olympics first took place in the eighth-century BC. But the motto now extends beyond the ability of the competitors themselves and ncompasses the vast array of technologies that are available to athletes in the 21st century. This is articularly so in swimming and cycling, two events that have seen technology enhance performances significantly in recent times and which look set to benefit from further advances at the summer games this month.

Development of smart inner city recreational facilities to encourage active living

Lowfield Park in Sheffield, UK is a green recreational space maintained by the City Council. Lowfield Park was selected as the primary Sheffield FieldLab for the ProFit project which ended in 2015. The ProFit project was European Interreg IVbNWE funded with the aim of encouraging physical activity through innovations in products, services and ICT systems. In 2014 the Sheffield Hallam University City Athletics Stadium (SHUCAS) was introduced as a secondary FieldLab. A number of innovative systems have been installed into the FieldLabs, these include: Pan Tilt Zoom cameras, automatically timed sprint and running tracks, outdoor displays/touchscreen and a gait analyser. This paper describes the hardware, software and cloud infrastructure created to enable these systems. Pilot testing has been carried out over the last year and has found a positive effect on both sites. The systems created will be taken forward to Sheffield’s Olympic Legacy Park, which is currently under development.

Computational Fluid Dynamic Analysis of a Water Ski Jumper

Water ski jumping is one of the oldest disciplines in water skiing. The first jump was performed by Ralph Samuelson of Minnesota (US) in 1925, three years after he had invented water skiing. Samuelson jumped 18 m off the end of a greased ramp. Today water ski jumping is an international sport with elite male athletes jumping distances in excess of 70 m. The Sports Engineering Research Group (SERG) at the University of Sheffield have conducted a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) analysis of the aerodynamic system of a water ski jumper for British Water Ski (BWS) in support of their 2005 World Championship campaign in China. The geometries of the water ski jumper and associated equipment were created using SERG’s in-house non-contact laser scanning facilities. Seven characteristic positional stages were analysed over the ski jump to obtain information on the fluctuations in lift and drag force acting upon the water ski jumper. The individual contribution of lift and drag, to the overall aerodynamic system of the water ski jumper, from each modeled component could be determined by the use of CFD. This indicated that the skis generate an average of 65 % of the entire system lift and drag, with the front third of the ski’s creating up to 50 % of these forces.