The key is minimising the disruptive effects of ventilation
ANYONE WHO has tried to play badminton at the beach will be familiar with the problem of wind blowing their feathered shuttlecocks off-course. On anything other than a completely calm day, playing even a half-serious game outside is a hopeless endeavour.
For that reason, all fully serious matches are played indoors. That reduces the problem of gusting shuttlecocks. But it does not eliminate it entirely. Indoor arenas must have ventilation, after all, and that sets up air currents of its own. When Annie and Kerry Xu, a pair of American players, were knocked out of the Paris Olympics earlier this year, one reason they gave was that they had not mastered the “drift” of their shuttlecocks in the newly built Adidas Arena, in the city’s 18th arrondissement.
For professionals, this is simply part of the sport. But it may be a smaller part in future. In a paper published on November 12th in Physics of Fluids, a group of researchers led by Karthik Jayanarasimhan, an engineer at the Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences, in Chennai, examine how to design an arena to minimise the problem.
The researchers investigated arenas with hemi-cylindrical barrel-roof designs. Such designs are popular: they are strong, give plenty of vertical room and offer unobstructed sightlines, all useful features in an indoor sports arena. The team examined two different ventilation layouts. In one the arena had ventilation holes on the gable ends, so that outside air flows down the length of the barrel; in the other the holes were on the front and back walls, so that air flows crosswise. For each configuration, they looked at three different roof heights.
They then fed their six virtual arenas (as well as one reference flat-roofed design) into fluid-dynamics software, which aims to simulate how air would move through the structures. Once all the numbers had been crunched, a clear winner emerged. A barrel-roofed design with the ventilation openings on the gable ends, and in which the height of the roof is slightly less than the breadth of the building, offered the calmest conditions on-court, without compromising ventilation.
If going to all this trouble seems a bit over the top, perhaps it shouldn’t. In some parts of the world—notably East Asia—badminton is big business. In 2014 the organisers of the Asian Games in South Korea were forced to deny claims from China that air-conditioning systems had been manipulated to favour local players. In future, perhaps physics could help clear the air. (Nov 14th 2024)
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