Jump to content
  • entries
    20
  • comment
    1
  • views
    4,000

Drag Force... in water!


csoup88

1,175 views

I recently realized how happy I am that I wrestle instead of swim, that is because not only would I have to wear a more embarrassing outfit than I do now, but I also would have to shave my legs! AHHHHHHHH!

Why do swimmers go to such outrageous measures to make themselves look like fools you ask! The answer is they have to battle the incredible effects of friction in the water! You might think this sounds crazy, how could water have such a large force of friction, but it does and it makes all the difference to people that are winning and losing literally by tenths of a second.

Drag force works its magic in very strange ways and in the pool, just as we learned earlier this year with air resistance, as velocity increases the drag force increases as well, which means the faster you go the harder you have to work to keep that speed! All of this depends on some fancy calculations and also Reynolds number which takes into account the shape of the object as well as the viscosity of the liquid, whether it be air or water.

I find out interestingly enough that at low Reynolds numbers the speed is proportional to the inverse of the Reynolds number and at higher numbers it is proportional to the square of the speed. This Reynolds number interested me as I researched this topic since we did not look at in our small stint on drag forces.

So those poor swimmers are stuck buying lots of very expensive swimsuits they can only use a few times so that they cut tiny tiny amounts of time of their strokes. I feel for them, and I'm going to stick to just beating people up.

0 Comments


Recommended Comments

There are no comments to display.

Guest
Add a comment...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...