Any Colour You Like

I went to a lecture yesterday in Bath about how Flexifoil design their kitesurfing kites. The speaker was a Dr Henry Something-Or-Other who had PHD in boundary layer theory from the University of Cambridge. Unfortunately it was one of the most annoying yet enthusing talks I have ever been to.

I know kitesurfing is a new sport and I knew many of the manufacturers have a trial and error approach to designing their products but Flexifoil have always advertised their ‘custom cad software’ and ‘research projects at Cambridge’. Turns out they do practically nothing with any scientific founding when designing their kites either. The constant excuse the speaker gave was money and personnel - deep down he did seem to want to do some proper theory though. But why oh why don’t they just dish this stuff out to universities to do as projects? 80% of our kitesurfing society are engineers and we would all kill for the possibility of doing a projects together with the kitesurfing industry. The company that first does some proper aerodynamic analysis will surely be able to develop noticeably higher performance products. I think we are going to have to do some of the work off our own backs and then approach Flexifoil to show them what they are missing…

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