Research Article Computational Fluid Dynamics Study of Swimmer’s Hand Velocity, Orientation, and Shape: Contributions to Hydrodynamics

Copyright © 2013 Milda Bilinauskaite et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The aimof this paper is to determine the hydrodynamic characteristics of swimmer’s scanned handmodels for various combinations of both the angle of attack and the sweepback angle and shape and velocity of swimmer’s hand, simulating separate underwater arm stroke phases of freestyle (front crawl) swimming. Four realistic 3D models of swimmer’s hand corresponding to different combinations of separated/closed fingers positions were used to simulate different underwater front crawl phases. The fluid flow was simulated using FLUENT (ANSYS, PA, USA). Drag force and drag coefficient were calculated using (computational fluid dynamics) CFD in steady state. Results showed that the drag force and coefficient varied at the different flow velocities on all shapes of the hand and variation was observed for different hand positions corresponding to different stroke phases. The models of th