Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have been donning their wet suits and hitting the waves this summer to see if an objective, data-centric standard can explain why some surfboards perform better than others.

Benjamin Thompson, who hails from small-town New Hampshire, has been leading the effort through his Ph.D. focus at the UCSD Department of Structural Engineering, zeroing in on the properties of composite fibers and how they specifically relate to surfboards. Thompson's ultimate goal is to see if surfboards have something called "optimal flexibility," a perfect point at which a board bends enough for a certain surfer.

"There's two schools of thought in surfing," Thompson told Wired.com. "Some think that the board should be as rigid as possible. Some think that flex is the most important thing ever. What I'm trying to do is develop an objective way to define performance."

For Thompson, who's been engulfed in this quest for two years now, it stems from a personal frustration with hearing accolades from friends about how a great a board was, only to find out that his experience didn't match up. "It's not like golf, where you can see how many yards the ball went and determine how good to club is. I'd have friends drop $600 on a new board because someone said it was sick, and my first thought was always, 'Well, how do you really know that?'"

So this summer, Thompson, armed with a team of enthusiastic UCSD undergrads, set out to brave the chilly waters north of San Diego for some actual in-wave testing. Thompson's prototypical system utilized eight sensors and an on-board microprocessor that collected data and, aside from storing it locally on a memory card, relayed it to an on-shore laptop.

The strategically placed sensors measured water velocity on the underside of the board. Here's a closer look at how the system came together:

The data gathered in this initial experimentation wasn't enough to draw any conclusions, Thompson says, but it did help in determining how future trials and prototypes might be rendered. For example, Thompson plans to deploy a board this fall that will be affixed with 50-odd sensors and mechanisms, including accelerometers, strain transducers and gyroscopic instrumentation. Thompson now knows, based on the initial tests, that the data set would be too large to transmit via radio waves to the on-shore computer, so the plan is to outfit the board with a removable flash drive that should be able to collate the entire data set without issue.

After the surfer has completed their run, they'll be interviewed and their analysis with be matched up with specific data points, in the same way a polygraph administrator would pair up lies told with spikes in the chart. "That's when we hope to finally correlate human performance with hard data," he says.

In his increasingly limited spare time, Thompson also runs Board Formula, a free online service that works to pair surfers with the proper board based on an array of specifications. But for now, Thompson is eager to get back to designing his next-gen prototype and continuing his self-appointed mission to bring more objectivity to surf science.

"I always hear so many contradictions from people about which board is better and for whom," Thompson said. "It's not that what they're saying is wrong. It's just not given enough context. You don't know about wave conditions or a person's body type, and that's what we're bringing into the equation."

Photos: UC San Diego

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