Paralympic athlete spearheads new aerodynamics research to improve wheelchair racing This is Melanie Woods, the 30-year-old wheelchair racer and Paralympian from Scotland. I started racing maybe about 5 years ago. I was unfortunately in an accident where I suffered a spinal injury, which meant that I was now a wheelchair user, and at that point I was kind of looking at sport and thinking, you know, what would it look like for me? Now, Melanie had been a PE teacher before she was hit by a car whilst out cycling, leaving her paralysed from the waist down, but her background in sport spurred on a determination to get active.
again, so she joined a local athletics club. When I first started, I was, yeah, absolutely no talent or superstar. In fact, it was really difficult, um, to even get around one lap of the track. Since 2018, Melanie has competed at two Paralympic Games and several World Championships, putting her in a unique place to inform new research from Lury University. The team is using a wind tunnel to test the aerodynamics of wheelchair racing. One key area is an athlete’s body position in their chairs while racing. We have, uh, besides me a wind tunnel, um, and.
the working section with a wheelchair mounted to it so it’s mounted to, uh, what we call a balance, so it’s essentially like a giant set of weighing scales, but instead of just weighing up and down like the scales you have at home, it will measure forwards and backwards, side to side, as well as up and down, so it allows us to measure all of the forces that are acting on that chair when we, um, when we turn the wind on, so what kind of things will Mel be doing in the wind tunnel, um, if we see an athlete in motion?
Of course it’s dynamic; they’re not holding particular positions, but in order for us to match it up with some computer simulations, we choose three positions, so we have catch, release, and recovery, which are three key parts of the driving motion that a wheelchair athlete would be performing as part of their proportion. We’ve identified those three as key for drag, so by asking Mel to hold those positions, we’re able to get really repeatable measurements. Melanie is performing the cat pose here.
snapshot of how she would look when pushing her chair’s wheels during a race. Dan and his team must find out whether this green outline of Mel’s body matches that in the 3D simulations. When a wheelchair athlete is racing, the biggest force that they’re going to encounter is that wind resistance, so we can feel this ourselves on a windy day, and we can feel the force that we have to put in to overcome that, so for us it’s really important to understand where that force comes from and any.
changes that we can make to try and reduce that force and allow the athlete to ultimately perform [Music] faster. The project is the work of PhD student Will Dixon, who’s showing me just how wind hits Melanie’s body and chair, bringing it down, seeing how it attaches over a helmet, and then where it’s really flapping about that’s where there’s lots of turbulence, so that’s where it’s separating from her body. Now if I bring it like across, like close to her arm, you can see that it’s attached to her arm, but then behind there it’s shedding and.
AC lots of wake, a lot of turbulence in that my background is in vehicle aerodynamics, and actually a vehicle, once we design those surfaces, it’s the same whether you’re driving it or I’m driving it; it performs the same aerodynamically. Wheelchair racing and cycling and many sports are completely different, so we work with wheelchair manufacturers to allow development of the equipment itself, but also we can inform the athlete to hold a slightly different position or even just update if they have a preferred position we can tell.
them what that costs Actually, in terms of track time and aerodynamic drag, some of the data gathered will apply to Melanie only, but the idea is to gather as much information as possible on how to realistically position an athlete in the catch, release, and recovery positions, ultimately broadening the knowledge of wheelchair racing. There’s so little research, um, into our sport, and, uh, I think that can limit the development of us moving forward with technology and getting faster. The position that you’re in in the chair is like the most.
significant part, and I think building the chair around you and your needs is incredibly important. It will take months before results from the project are fully analysed, but Dan tells me the preliminary findings are positive and that those three key positions could provide a framework to helping athletes get faster in their sport. The research that they’re doing into the aerodynamics and how your position affects that will hopefully help them come out with some kind of guidelines or some influence on what position you choose.