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Swimsuit Design Uses Supercomputing
Roland Piquepaille writes "These days, most competitive swimmers wear some type of body suit to reduce high skin-friction drag from water. And makers of swimwear are already busy working on new models for the Olympics 2008. According to Textile & Apparel, Speedo is even using a supercomputer to refine its designs. Its engineers run Fluent Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program on an SGI Altix system."
I'm afraid something similar to that almost happened.
in the moscow olympics, they almost decided to let the swimmers swim without a costume, as that was the way the designers were going.
before this happened though, most swim suits were made out of an extra fine silk, that when wet, made bettter viewing than that of a wet t-shirt. They combated that by brightly coulouring the suits and putting on fancy designs.
its amazing what you learn in textiles and from reading Swimsuit design books...
For a little more detail on the CFD, check this link:3 i1/a1.htm
http://www.fluent.com/about/news/newsletters/04v1
I'm a swimmer myself, and when I was younger I trained with the ordinary, plain-vanilla speedos. Lately, our coach has been encouraging the use of the more high-tech suit designs for competitions, so I got ahold of one of those "fastskin" suits that Speedo sells. Surprisingly enough, you can actually feel the difference. (And it shaved a second or two off my times as well.)
So if Speedo is going through such great lengths to improve their suits, I wouldn't be surprised. I'm just impressed that a suit design can make such a big difference.
Still, I'm a traditionalist. I don't need no newfangled swimsuits to win a competition! Skinnydipping forever!