British engineers help Olympic athletes become more competitive
JAN 04, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.024942
Guardian : Engineers from the UK’s largest defense company, BAE Systems, are using defense technology to help the British Olympic team. Among their successes is a device called Drake that they invented for the sailing team. Drake can model vast amounts of meteorological data by taking and processing readings of the key weather factors, including wind speed and direction and temperature and humidity changes, writes Alok Jha for the Guardian. For the bobsledding team, BAE recruited PhD students to devise a method of customizing each sled for individual athletes. The BAE engineers’ next goal is to improve the racing wheelchair used by Paralympians—by using an Airbus wind tunnel to study the wheelchair’s construction and determine the best seating position for different types of races.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
