Tom, you are currently leading the development of swimming gear at Speedo's Aqualab. What is your background?

My background is reasonably academic. My undergraduate degree was in design engineering. I had an active interest in sports and the human body, and my research before joining Aqualab was focused on using technology to enhance sports performance. After my PhD at the Sports Technology Institute at Loughborough University, I moved onto working as a consultant for a company called Progressive Sports. We were bringing the facilities and expertise of sports technology to pretty much every major brand that was active in sports — including Speedo — and when an opportunity came up to lead Aqualab, it was an offer I couldn't really refuse.

How easy was the switch from academia to Aqualab?

It meant changing to a radically different pace of life. Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life it is being a consultant. Getting into the real world, the need to engage with stakeholders within the business, understanding the complexities of bringing a prototype to commercial life, and the need to deliver a measurable return on the R&D investment creates numerous challenges. I've learned a tremendous amount — probably more in the past three years than I did in many of my years in academia.

In developing new swimwear, who do you work with?

Credit: © SPEEDO

First and foremost, I am working with my team here at Aqualab. They look after projects that we commission externally or research that we do in-house, so that we can make better informed decisions when developing our designs. To do that we have a research team (a sports technology focused team working with advanced testing facilities and expert individuals) and an innovation team (a collection of very experienced designers from backgrounds from automotive to lingerie) who are able to use our research results and turn them into new concepts. We also have a materials team that are scouting the world for advanced materials, fabrics and finishing chemistries. Finally, there's a development team who use our prototyping facility in conjunction with our manufacturing partners to turn all of that into a product.

What are the functionalities you look for when scouting for new materials?

It varies depending on the type of project. The projects we get involved in could be to do with health and wellbeing right up to the most difficult end of the scale, which is trying to help an athlete swim faster. We generally look for materials and fabrics that allow us to control the form and shape of the body in a comfortable way.

What is the source of these new materials?

In bringing new materials to life, we work with universities and independently funded research firms, but the most important partners are definitely the fabric mills and materials suppliers all over the world. We rely heavily on them to either respond to our new briefs, or to modify the equipment or the materials that they've already created for us.

What technologies are used in your latest range of swimwear, the Fastskin Racing System?

The main emphasis of the Fastskin Racing System project was on creating a complete racing system. We looked at the force that hits the standard racing goggles as you dive into the water, and with the new design we've been able to reduce that force by up to 63.4%. Similarly, we often see pretty bad habits with the way people wear caps: not putting them on properly, wrinkles, poor positioning of the hair bundle. Therefore, we used head-scan data to find an ideal shape for the cap, and we designed a suit, cap and goggles to work together and to manage the flow of water from the top of the head to the tips of the toes. Probably the biggest move in terms of materials is in the Fastskin3 Super Elite suit. Within this suit, we are able to vary the amount of compression that we put on different parts of the body so that we can create quite a specific shape. If you think about any object that can move quickly through a fluid like water, such as a torpedo, it tends to have a smoother, more tubular form. The human body doesn't have a particularly smooth form; it has lumps and bumps all over it. We've used a type of fabric where we vary the percentage of Lycra to create hot spots of compression and shape the body more effectively than ever before.

What are the experiments and analyses that you need to run to come up with such complex designs?

First of all we try to simulate as much as we possibly can. We use a computational fluid dynamics package to test three-dimensional forms for our designs until we have a good idea of what shapes to aim for. We then link that up with experimental characterization of fabrics, where we measure the speed of water flowing over the surface of a fabric fixed onto a standard reference plate. We also play around with the surface chemistry of that fabric using liquid fluorocarbon-type finishes, and we benchmark it against all of the fabrics we've created in the past. That creates the specifications for a set of products including the suit. When we've got prototypes we're happy with, we take them to a swimming pool facility and we try to recreate the level of drag reduction that we were seeing in the simulations. We look at passive drag, where we pull someone submerged in a glide: arms out in front, toes stretched out at back, the sort of shape you see after a turn. And we've seen a reduction in passive drag compared with a standard swimsuit, silicon cap and racing goggles of up to 16.6% with the Fastskin Racing System. We also measure active drag, the drag created at the surface that includes wave drag, and we've seen drag reductions of about 5.5%.

What does the surface of the Fastskin3 Super Elite suit look like?

The surface of the suit is quite unique in that we're using the back of the fabric, which really shows up the different curved zones of Lycra. We put a fluorocarbon finish onto it, which allows water to move within the structure but not penetrate the fibres, so that we get a fabric that gives us quite a low drag.

Earlier Fastskin suits mimicked the skin of sharks by having a microstructured surface. What is the advantage of the new finish?

We've always used liquid finishes, and as we've moved on, we've found that a smoother surface with the right chemistry gives us a faster effect, to the point where we can deliberately accelerate and decelerate the flow of water in certain areas.

With these swimsuits is there also an optimum swimming technique that athletes have to adopt?

There's definitely a learning process. We are changing the athletes' body shapes, we are changing the way the water feels when it flows over their body, and we are asking them to consider how they wear the suit, cap and goggles together. Inevitably, there's a familiarization phase, and the time that takes really depends on the athlete.

Do you have any data on how comfort affects the athletes' performance, or is that a soft aspect of the design?

You could describe that as a soft aspect, but to be successful the athlete needs to be in the right frame of mind. All of those more subjective aspects of products are really high on our agenda, and we are trying to turn that into a statistical measure. However, to an Olympic athlete, who is looking for high levels of compression and actually a certain amount of discomfort, the measure of comfort is clearly very different compared with someone who wants to swim wearing a second skin that they effectively can't feel.

How often can athletes wear the same swimsuit?

In the past, the suits had a fairly finite life. Previous technologies were more based on woven fabrics, which can be susceptible to plastic deformation. When you have athletes that like to wear a suit that is as tight as possible, such permanent deformation can occur quite easily, and the athletes like to regularly replace their suits to ensure that out-of-the-box fit. The new fabric is knitted, which allows a greater degree of stretch within the structure as well as benefiting from the higher Lycra content. This gives an extremely durable material, and actually, most of the feedback that we've had is that it retains its shape after many fits.

Your previous swimsuit, the Speedo LZR Racer, was a giant success in terms of performance but later got prohibited. Why was that?

It wasn't so much that the suit was prohibited. Actually, FINA, the Fédération Internationale de Natation, reacted to the swimming community, commercial brands included, and they decided they wanted to change the rules towards a more rigid process in bringing new technologies into sports swimming. The Speedo LZR Racer at the time was designed very much within the rules. These rules changed at the end of 2009, which created a new playing field for us. There were certain elements within the Speedo LZR Racer that worked really well; some of those elements have been brought forward into the Fastskin Racing System, and some have not because they would not pass the new sets of rules.

What are the most important limitations that you are facing?

Before, we were essentially allowed to cover the entire body. The male athletes are now only allowed to wear suits from the knee to the navel, and the female athletes' suits can reach from the knee to the shoulder. We can't use any zippers or fasteners. The suits also have to be made of a standard textile, and we're not allowed to put laminate-type structures onto the surface that might trap air or affect the way that the fabric underneath would perform. But with the Fastskin3 Super Elite suit we've been able to create a superior form, and some of the constraints have driven high levels of innovation. We have patents pending on how you get into the suit; you get into the female suits through the arm hole, which allows us to get around not having a zipper or fastener but still maintain high levels of coverage. The more fabric we can put onto the skin, the faster the athletes can get, because skin is — even if you shave down — very flexible, so it can be quite draggy.

In introducing such a new suit, what steps do you have to take?

We work hard on bringing athletes and coaches along with us on the journey. They influence and inform us at the very beginning of the project, and we have various touch points throughout the four-year programme, whereby they feed back on prototypes and on the different iterations that we go through.

And on the regulatory side?

Every July there's a window where we can submit new swimwear technology for the following year. It takes a month or so to get approval; FINA check buoyancy, permeability and adherence to some of the specific criteria for those products within their rules, and as soon as we get approval we go into production.

Is there competition in equipping elite athletes between you and other companies such as Arena or Adidas?

Oh, very much. It's a highly competitive environment, and that's part of what makes it fun. Yes, we have great competitors out there. You've mentioned the main ones, but since the rules changed, it's become quite a busy environment.

What are the most important materials and technologies that you could use to further improve swimwear?

I have to be very careful in answering that question, because it's something that we are actually working on. I think it's very important that individual athletes are able to get the best possible experience for them. Selecting the right product is a good start, but personalization is an important trend, so our ability to cater to individual needs will be vital. As we improve our ability to understand the flow of water on a macro-, micro- and even nanoscale, we can amend technologies to manipulate and improve that.

How much improvement in swimming performance do you think can still be made within current regulations?

That's really down to the athletes. We have to remember that the athletes have spent their last four years of preparation focusing on the 2012 Olympic Games. Everything they have been doing — eating, sleeping, thinking — has been leading up to the moment in July where they're going to get onto the big stage. We make up one part of that. We're very proud to work with some of the best athletes in the world, and we've done everything we can to really maximize their potential, but it's not us that gets them to the podium, it's them that gets us to the podium.

Interview by Christian Martin