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Swimming Physics

midnightpanther

Entry posted by midnightpanther

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The other day my cousin did the 500m in a swim meet he had and he came in third place and I thought about that and found out that this would mean doing 20 laps in the high school pool and I wondered what kind of physics was involved and the work he did to complete this race. To simplify this problem I am only going to think about the horizontal component of his swimming because otherwise it would be a lot more complex and I would like to think that his buoyant force might almost even out with gravity pulling him down. So when swimming, he wants to apply a force to the water, and because of Newton's second law, the water would then apply the same force to him, making him more, similar to how we walk. So, knowing that the sum of the forces=mass times acceleration, and because I don't really know how long it took him, we'll just estimate it took 10 minutes. Based on the fact that it took him about 10 minutes to go 500 meters we can find his average velocity to be about .83m/s. Then, after looking up on google that the drag for water is around .5 for a sphere (his head) we can find the force of friction to be 80N. Then using this we can solve for the net force which would mean he is doing applying 120N of force for ten minutes giving him a work of .2N/s. This does not make any sense.

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SwagDragon15

This is prolly an origional idea, seeing as I and chuck (who copied me) have both done previous posts regarding the topic. (mines the best) Nonetheless, great post midnightpanther, whoever you areeee :worked_till_5am:

See ya in three and a half hours, baby ; )

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CharlieEckert

SwagDragon15 my post about swimming have definitely been better. Plus I've done like 8 on swimming. Midnightpanther your cousin net work is his change in gravitational potential energy from standing on the block to to where he finishes in the water.

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