Guest editorial article, special issue on sports engineering

This issue contains ten papers that form the second part of the special issue on Sports Engineering. Each paper in its own way is outstanding. They show the diversity of the activity that comes under the heading of sports engineering, and yet they have a unity in that they all address questions that have arisen from actual experience, none more so than the first paper by Nigel Mills on the design of bicycle helmets. This is a topic that has occupied Dr Mills for many years, and the range of experience he brings to this study - which combines finite-element modelling, user input, materials technology, and experiment - is formidable. The second paper by Peter MacKenzie and Gareth Bradley is a response to a quite different challenge, that of devising a new material that has the property of being metastable, that is, it can be a solid or mouldable at the desire of the user, who may wish to customize a splint or a shin guard. The next two papers arise from the work of the Edinburgh Ice Mechanics group led by Jane Blackford, in which they looked first of all at the fundamental science behind the use of sweeping the stone in curling and also developed an instrumented broom to assist in the development of technique. Although these papers are of a purely technical nature, their application abuts the verges of applied psychology

Sports Engineering vs Sports Innovation

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Emerging Material

On the Use of Inertial Sensors in Educational Engagement Activities

Wearable sensors have been successfully used for a few decades in different sporting applications and its use has been constrained mostly to research projects. However, its positive impact has been recently adding other directions towards education, commercial and servicing. The establishment of Sports Engineering as a discipline is playing an important role in Australian universities where relevant material and emerging technologies are required to be taught and in certain circumstances developed. Some of these technologies include the adoption of inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes). This paper shares the impact of inertial sensors in building engagement in different educational activities at secondary level, with the purpose of engaging them into Sports Engineering disciplines, and at tertiary level through teaching undergraduate and post-graduate programs

Resources for sports engineering education

This paper serves as a resource guide for Sports Engineering educators. The paper covers key topics in Sports Engineering, including ball impact, friction, safety and materials. A variety of resource types are presented to reflect modern methods of learning and searching for information, including textbooks, research and review papers, websites and videos. The field could benefit from more resources specifically designated for teaching Sports Engineering, particularly textbooks

Hyperelastic modelling of nonlinear running surfaces

Accurate, 3-D analyses of running impact require a constitutive model of the running surface that includes the material nonlinearity shown by many modern surfaces. This paper describes a hyperelastic continuum that mimics the experimentally measured response of a particular treadmill surface. The material model sacrifices a little accuracy to admit a robust, low-order hyperelastic strain-energy functional. This helps prevent the premature termination of finite element simulations, due to numerical or material instabilities, that can occur with higher-order functionals. With only two free constants, it is also a more practical design tool. The best fit to the quasi-static response of the treadmill was achieved with an initial shear modulus =2 MPa and a power-stiffening index =25. The paper outlines the method used to derive the material constants for the treadmill, a device that is not amenable to the usual materials laboratory tests and must be reverse-engineered. Finite element analyses were then performed to ensure that the treadmill model interacts with the other components of the multibody running system in a numerically stable and physically realistic manner. The model surface was struck by a rigid heel, cushioned by a hyperfoam material that represents a shoe midsole. The results show that, while the ground reaction force is similar to that obtained with a rigid surface, the maximum principal stress in the shoe is reduced by 15%. Such a reduction, particularly when endured over many load cycles, may have a significant effect on comfort and damage to nearby tissue

Editorial: New initiative: "Ten Questions in Sports Engineering" papers

The journal Sports Engineering launches a new publication initiative: “Ten Questions in Sports Engineering” papers. Ten questions papers should deal with a well-defined topic and should be centered around a selection of ten relevant and topical questions. Submissions are based on invitation only by an (Associate) Editor of the journal

Race-time prediction for the Va’a paralympic sprint canoe

The 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro will see 200m sprint canoe events for the first time, using the Va’a class. The aim of this study is to predict race times for the Va’a over a 200m sprint event, through simulation of the hydrodynamic resistance of the hull (with outrigger) and the propulsion provided by the athlete. Such a simulation, once suitably validated, allows investigation of design and configuration changes on predicted race performance. The accuracy of the simulation is discussed through a comparison to times recorded for an athlete over a 200m race distanc

Application of serious games to sport, health and exercise

Use of interactive entertainment has been exponentially expanded since the last decade. Throughout this 10+ year evolution there has been a concern about turning entertainment properties into serious applications, a.k.a "Serious Games". In this article we present two set of Serious Game applications, an Environment Visualising game which focuses solely on applying serious games to elite Olympic sport and another set of serious games that incorporate an in house developed proprietary input system that can detect most of the human movements which focuses on applying serious games to health and exercise