Author : Shubham S. Mahajan and S. P. Wadkar

Swimming being one of the very well known athletic sports, a lot of efforts are being made by the competitive swimmers to set new records. Therefore, in order to swim faster, there must be more thrust generated by the swimmer and the drag which resists the swimmer must be should be decreased. Experimental tests which are done on the swimmers help to determine the propulsive forces generated by the swimmer but these are very costly and also complicated. Hence researchers have applied numerical techniques of computational fluid dynamics as an alternative to the experimental methods to determine the force coefficients around the hand and arm which closely resembled those which were determined experimentally. These CFD techniques are being used all over the world on competitive swimmers to increase their thrust to the water to swim faster and are tested at various angles of attack of the hand. A motion study for the same is made here of how these techniques were applied to enhance the speed of the swimmers.

Keywords: CFD technique, force coefficients, thrust