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

Pendulation control of an offshore crane

This paper considers a control system for a crane that reduces pendulation of suspended loads in offshore lifting operations. The modelling of the ship crane is studied and an anti-pendulation arm is designed and proposed. Two different types of models are derived, one based on torque and one kinematic. For the torque model, Lyapunov analysis and non-linear control design is applied on the vertical plane. Linear control design techniques for the linearized kinematic model are applied in both vertical and horizontal planes. These techniques are based on linear quadratic Gaussian (LQG) and generalized predictive control (GPC). The advantage for the linear control designs is the explicit use of the vessel dynamics and sea wave disturbances in the control design that considerably improves the controlled pendulation of the crane. Design issues, simulation results and comparison studies are considered

Expiratory flow limitation and breathing strategies in overweight adolescents during submaximal exercise

Objective: To investigate whether ventilatory factors limit exercise in overweight and obese children during a 6-min step test and to compare ventilatory responses during this test with those of healthy weight children. Design: Cross-sectional, prospective comparative study. Subjects: Twenty-six overweight/obese subjects and 25 healthy weight subjects with no known respiratory illness. Measurements: Various fatness and fat distribution parameters (using air displacement plethysmography and anthropometry), pulmonary function tests, breath-by-breath gas analysis during exercise, perceived exertion. Results: Young people who are overweight or obese are more likely to experience expiratory flow limitation (expFL) during submaximal exercise compared with their healthy weight peers [OR 7.2 (1.4, 37.3), P=0.019]. Subjects who had lower lung volumes at rest were even more likely to experience exercise-induced expFLs [OR 8.35 (1.4–49.3)]. Both groups displayed similar breathing strategies during submaximal exercise. Conclusion: Young people who are overweight/obese are more likely to display expFL during submaximal exercise compared with children of healthy weight. Use of compensatory breathing strategies appeared to enable overweight children to avoid the experience of breathlessness at this intensity of exercise

Parental education and lung function of children in the PATY study

Studies of the relationships between low socio-economic status and impaired lung function were conducted mainly in Western European countries and North America. East–West differences remain unexplored. Associations between parental education and lung function were explored using data on 24,010 school-children from eight cross-sectional studies conducted in North America, Western and Eastern Europe. Parental education was defined as low and high using country-specific classifications. Country-specific estimates of effects of low parental education on volume and flow parameters were obtained using linear and logistic regression, controlling for early life and other individual risk factors. Meta-regressions were used for assessment of heterogeneity between country-specific estimates. The association between low parental education and lung function was not consistent across the countries, but showed a more pronounced inverse gradient in the Western countries. The most consistent decrease associated with low parental education was found for peak expiratory flow (PEF), ranging from −2.80 to −1.14%, with statistically significant associations in five out of eight countries. The mean odds ratio for low PEF (<75% of predicted) was 1.34 (95% CI 1.06–1.70) after all adjustments. Although social gradients were attenuated after adjusting for known risk factors, these risk factors could not completely explain the social gradient in lung function