Engineering students Victor Correa Schneider, Trevor Owen, Julia Tsai,
Dan Ferguson, and Benjamin Thompson of UC San Diego

Duuuude, how’s this for a Ph.D. project: Benjamin Thompson, a structural engineering student at UC San Diego, is on a quest to formulate the science of surfboards. He enlisted the help of four undergraduates in the mechanical engineering department to help him out, and together they hit the beach to find out more.

The research involves attaching sensors to the boards that will measure water velocity, as well as a microprocessor (the square instrument fixed on the board above) that saves the data and transmits it wirelessly to a laptop. Through this project, Thompson hopes to gain more knowledge of how water interacts with different surfboards and what degree of flexibility is most desirable in board materials.

Watch the students explain more about their experiment as they try to hang ten:

For more photos of this cool project, check out this blog. And if you’re lucky enough to attend UCSD, you can even take a class about the physics of surfing:

Image via UCSD

Filed under: Computer, e-News, Mechanical, Ocean

Tags: Computer, Mechanical, Ocean