Tag: aerodynamics

Milano Cortina 2026: Speedskating Team Pursuit
Track cycling and speedskating often mirror one another, with similar events in each sport. In the team pursuit, for example, cyclists and skaters compete as a team to post the fastest time for a given distance. In cycling events, riders spend the race tucked into a line, with the lead rider providing a draft for their teammates. But that’s a tiring position for a cyclist, so every few laps the lead rider will pull off, move up the track, and drop behind their teammates for a rest. Speedskaters used to use the same technique. But no longer.
After working with aerodynamic simulation specialists, U.S. Speedskating pioneered a new race technique, in which skaters never change positions. Instead, each racer specializes in one position and skates while pushing the skater ahead of them. The technique requires a lot of practice, finesse, and trust; skaters in the later positions cannot see, skating as close as they can to the skater in front of them.
But, performance-wise, the new technique works. It’s taken U.S. women’s team pursuit from eighth in the world to number one. Other teams have adopted the technique, too, so this is likely what team pursuit will look like in the years to come. (Image credits: various, see image captions; via NPR)
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February 17, 2026
Milano Cortina 2026: Ski Jumping Suits
Ski jumping is in the news this Olympic cycle after rumors that male competitors may be cheating in order to wear larger suits. In particular, the suggestion is that male athletes are injecting fillers into their genitals before their pre-season 3D body scan in order to appear large enough to allow them to wear a larger suit. This comes after two Norwegian ski jumpers were punished for illegally restitching the crotches of their suits to make them larger.
Ski jumping is a sport that relies heavily on aerodynamics; during the flight phase, jumpers try to maximize their lift-to-drag ratio so that they stay aloft as long as possible. A 2025 study underscores the importance of suit size in this calculus. In the work, the researchers used a baseline suit that was 4 centimeters larger in circumference than their jumper–the loosest configuration that regulations allow. They compared that suit’s flight performance (in wind tunnels and simulation) to a suit 2 cm larger and one 2 cm smaller. The extra 2 centimeters of circumference made a notable difference: the larger suit increased the drag by ~4% and lift by ~5%. That was enough, in their simulation, to let a jumper fly an extra 5.8 meters.
It’s worth noting, though, that the study was looking at the effects of adjusting the suit’s circumference along the entire length between the arm pits and the knees; they never changed anything about the suit’s crotch. I don’t think there’s enough scientific data to say that packing a bit more there would really offer aerodynamic advantages. And the risks of such injections are non-negligible. (Image credit: T. Trapani; research credit: M. Virmavirta et al.; via Ars Technica)
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February 16, 2026
Flettner Rotors Spin Anew
In the 1920s, the world saw a new sort of marine propulsion, ships with one or more tall, smokeless cylinders. These Flettner rotors, named for their inventor, would spin in the wind, generating lift to propel the boat, much as a sail would. (The difference is that the rotor uses the Magnus effect.)
The market crash that kicked off the Great Depression spelled an end to the rotorship, but the idea is getting revived as industries search for greener forms of ship propulsion. Although the Flettner rotor still uses fuel (to spin the rotor), it can complete a voyage on only a small fraction of the fuel needed for conventional propulsion. (Image credit: Getty Images; via PopSci)
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October 16, 2025
Paris 2024: Beach Versus Indoor Volleyballs
Some of the differences between beach volleyball and indoor volleyball are obvious, like the number of players allowed — two versus six — and the courts — a smaller sand court versus a bigger indoor court. But there are subtle and significant differences in the balls themselves. Both beach and indoor volleyballs used for competition are required to weigh between 260 and 280 grams, but the expected diameter of the balls differs by about 1 centimeter, with beach volleyballs coming out slightly larger. The balls differ in their surface roughness, too, with indoor models being smoother, even before in-game wear.
Although these differences seem minor, they can make a significant impact in the game. Volleyball regulations don’t specify a ball’s expected surface roughness or how many panels they should be made with. As in football, these seemingly cosmetic changes can strongly affect airflow around the ball and change its trajectory. Regulations require that all balls used in a given match be uniform, but that still requires athletes to potentially adjust to the behavior of a new ball at each competition. (Image credits: I. Garifullin, C. Chaurasia, C. Oskay, and M. Teirlinck)
Related topics: How smoothness and panel design affect a football, volleyball aerodynamics, and vortex generators on cycling skinsuits
For more ongoing and past Olympic coverage, click here.
August 5, 2024
Paris 2024: Bouncing and Spinning
Spin, or the lack thereof, plays a major role in many sports — including tennis, golf, football, baseball, volleyball, and table tennis — because it affects whether flow stays attached around a ball, as well as how much lift or side force a ball gets. A ball’s spin doesn’t stay constant, however. During flight, a ball’s spin decays at a rate proportional to its initial spin and velocity. Researchers have found that a ball’s moment of inertia, flow regime, and surface roughness all affect that decay, but which factor is the most significant varies by ball and by sport.
Whether a ball bounces while spinning also matters. For compliant balls on a non-compliant surface — think tennis balls on a court — a bounce can actually change how much a ball spins. During impact, a tennis ball can: slide, decreasing its tangential velocity while increasing its topspin; roll, where the ball’s tangential velocity matches the tangential velocity of the surface; or over-spin, where the ball spins faster than it rolls. For a given impact angle and velocity, researchers found that stiffer and/or lighter balls were more likely to over-spin. Within tennis’s allowable range of ball stiffness and mass, manufacturers could create tennis balls that over-spin far more than conventional ones, creating another opportunity for deceptive tactics in the sport. (Image credit: J. Calabrese; research credit: T. Allen et al.)
Related topics: How flow separates from a surface, and why turbulence is sometimes preferable
Find all of our Olympics coverage — past and ongoing — here and every sports post here.
July 31, 2024
Wasps in Flight
Personally, I’ve had some bad encounters with wasps, but Dr. Adrian Smith of Ant Lab feels the insects receive short shrift. In this video, he shows many species in the order — most of which are venomless and stingless. In high-speed video, their flight is mesmerizing. Wasps have separate fore- and hindwings, but during flight, they move them like a single wing. Velcro-like hooks on the edges of the wings hold the two together.
From a mechanics perspective, I find this fascinating. Aerodynamically, I’d expect much greater benefits from one large wing over two small ones, but outside of flight, separate wings are more easily tucked away. It’s so neat that wasps have a way to enjoy the benefits of both, enabled by a simple but secure line of hooks. (Video and image credit: Ant Lab/A. Smith)
July 8, 2024
“Mason Bee at Work”
Mason bees like this one build landmarks to help them navigate as they construct a shelter for their eggs. Even hauling materials, these bees can easily stay aloft. This is in contrast to an old misconception that physics can’t explain how a bee flies. It’s true that bees don’t fly using the same mechanisms as a typical airplane — no fixed wings here! But they, like every other flyer aerodynamicists study, still produce lift and drag and thrust. The flapping of a bee’s wings generates much unsteadier quantities of these things, but at its small size, that is no hindrance to its ability to control its flight and even carry cargo. (Image credit: S. Zankl; via Wildlife POTY)
April 8, 2024
Optimizing Wind Farms Collectively
In a typical wind farm, each wind turbine aligns itself to the local wind direction. In an ideal world where every turbine was completely independent, this would maximize the power produced. But with changing wind directions and many turbines, it’s inevitable that upstream wind turbines will interfere with the flow their downstream neighbors see.
So, instead, a research team investigated how to optimize the collective output of a wind farm. Their strategy involved intentionally misaligning the upstream wind turbines to improve conditions for downstream turbines. They found that the loss in power generation by upstream turbines could be more than recovered by improved performance downstream.
After testing their models over many months in an actual wind farm, they reported that their methodology could, on average, increase overall energy output by about 1.2 percent. That may sound small, but the team estimates that if existing wind farms used the method, it would generate additional power equivalent to the needs of 3 million U.S. households. (Image credit: N. Doherty; research credit: M. Howland et al.; via Boston Globe; submitted by Larry S.)
September 29, 2022
Seeing the Flow
Experimentalists often need a sense for the overall flow before they can decide where to measure in greater detail. For such situations, flow visualization techniques are a powerful tool since they provide quick ways to see and compare flows.
Here, researchers paint a viscous oil atop their flying wing model and observe how the oil moves once the air flow starts up. This oil flow visualization shows the large-scale shifts in how air flows over the craft as the angle of attack increases. The disadvantage is that these techniques often give only a qualitative sense of the flow. But they can allow experimentalists to test many different conditions to decide which specific cases they should examine quantitatively. (Image and video credit: V. Kumar et al.)
August 31, 2022
Measuring Drag
After a noticeable rise in the prevalence of home runs beginning in 2015, Major League Baseball commissioned a report that found the increase was caused by a small 3% reduction in drag on the league’s baseballs. When such small differences have a big effect on the game, it’s important to be able to measure a baseball’s drag in flight accurately.
In the past, that measurement has often been done in a wind tunnel, but the mounting mechanisms used there result in drag measurements that are a little higher than what’s seen from video tracking in actual games. Now researchers have developed a new free-flight method for measuring a baseball’s drag. The drag measurements from their new method are lower than those for wind-tunnel-mounted baseballs and in better agreement with video-based methods. The authors’ method should be adaptable to other sports like cricket and tennis, which will hopefully provide new insight into the subtleties of their aerodynamics. (Image credit: T. Park; research credit: L. Smith and A. Sciacchitano; via Ars Technica; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)
June 2, 2022