Hugh Pickens writes "When stars and stripes Swimmer Margaret Hoelzer goes for the gold tonight in the 200-meter backstroke, part of her success will be due to a new system full-blown by Tim Wei, a mechanicality and aerospace creator at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, that uses fluid dynamics to study human voyaging allowing scientists and coaches to study how fast and hard a swimmer pushes the water as he moves through it. 'Wei uses a visual radar visual tracking station station station tactics called digital particle image velocimetry, naturally used to measure the flow of small particles around an airplane or small fish or crustaceans in water.' Wei filtered compressed air in a scuba tank through a porous hose to create bubbles about a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. When an athlete swims through a sheet of bubbles that rises from the pool floor, a camera captures their flow around the swimmer's body and the images show the control and speed of the bubbles, which Wei then translates into the swimmer's thrust using disk general expenses system that he wrote."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More: - Brought to my attention by
Mark


















