"From Carbon to Olympic Gold" is the name of an original, interdisciplinary project in the sporting field using the resources of GENCI's Jean Zay supercomputer hosted and operated by IDRIS (a CNRS center). It aims to position French sailing at the top of the podium for the 2024 Olympics.
.
Interdisciplinarity at the service of performance
It's codenamed "C_to_or". Its aim? To put science at the service of sporting performance during the sailing events of the 2024 Olympic Games! Literally "From carbon to Olympic gold", this project is in the wake of the "Sciences 2024" initiative which, using physics, mechanics and mathematics, develops innovative scientific solutions, in synergy with the Ministry of Sports' "Performance 2024" program.
Winner of the "Sports de Très Haute Performance" Priority Research Plan (funded by Investissements d'Avenir, managed by ANR), "C_to_or" is an interdisciplinary project involving laboratories specializing in solid and fluid mechanics, and in the cognitive ergonomics of sport.
The diversity of the scientific disciplines mobilized is echoed in the richness of the ecosystem involved. Some highly complementary players are pooling their expertise to serve French performance: the Fédération Française de Voile (FFV); the École Nationale de Voile et des Sports Nautiques; the ESPCI-Paris; the École Navale; Ifremer; the CNRS; the Université de Nantes; and finally the École Polytechnique.
Women and men as the measure of all things
Moreover, this project is singular in the place and role accorded to the various contributors. The research teams become, so to speak, contributors to the "scientific preparation" of athletes and their equipment, in the same way as physical or technical trainers. A strong link is created between coaches, athletes and scientists. Some sports federations, such as the FFV, have appointed scientific advisors. However, neither scientific knowledge nor cutting-edge technological tools take precedence over athletes' feelings:
"The final truth, in a way, is what the athlete says", in the words of Patrick Bot, teacher-researcher at the École Navale, and Laetitia Pernod, postdoctoral fellow at the École Navale, who are using the resources of the Jean Zay supercomputer as part of this project. "They have an experience, a sensitivity, a very fine feel for how their gear works"continue the two scientists.
During "extraction sessions", the researchers take part in training sessions and discussions in depth and detail in order to formalize the athletes' issues to which they can provide answers. This is one of the leitmotifs of Sciences 2024: to be useful to athletes, who are ultimately the authors of performance.
In particular, these sessions highlighted the need to help athletes choose and adjust their equipment more effectively.
Four major scientific areas
-
The first part essentially involves the use of cognitive sciences
Researchers at the University of Nantes in particular are developing this whole part, which consists of systematically requesting, rationalizing, qualifying and categorizing athletes' feedback in order to link it to mechanical or physical properties that will be determined scientifically.
.
-
The second involves the mechanical characterization of equipment parts.
Essentially the foils, and to qualify the disparities identified between the various units. This led to the implementation of onboard measurements. This is "a real challenge" for Patrick Bot and Laetitia Pernod, as "in particular, it involves associating a physical phenomenon with how the athletes feel at a given moment t".
-
The third deals with hydrodynamics
While digital simulation technologies are of major interest here, improving performance also depends on input from athletes. They are invited to suggest parameters to enable "simulation" as close to reality as possible. The experience and feelings of athletes are particularly important in determining the efforts produced and the performance gaps in a given situation, particularly in terms of variability, stability, tolerance and ease of use. The use of supercomputers is essential here, not only because of the volume of data processed and operations performed in the field of CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics), but also because of the unusual nature of the parameters desired by athletes compared with those conventionally used in the academic world. In this sense, Patrick Bot and Laetitia Pernod point out that many athletes question the "surface condition" of their foils and hulls with a view to improving glide. "This is a very open field of knowledge" requiring the use of powerful tools due to the limited elements available, on hydrodynamics of foils for example. Although foils are well known and increasingly used to reduce forward resistance by lifting the vessel out of the water, thus enabling higher speeds to be reached, "foils are nonetheless a relatively recent technology, and therefore still subject to many physical misunderstandings and technological locks"
.
-
The fourth and final section covers all aspects of aerodynamics.
Foil craft have extremely reduced drag in the water compared to a traditional boat, and aerodynamic drag becomes an essential ingredient of forward drag that needs to be minimized. In addition, athletes frequently use unsteady propulsion modes ("pumping") which also need to be optimized a little more systematically.
Simulation numérique (CFD) de l'écoulement autour d'un foil de planche à voile (windfoil) - Droits image : projet « Du carbone à l’or olympique »
500,000 hours have been allocated free of charge by GENCI to this project on the Jean Zay supercomputer, enabling the acceleration of knowledge in the service of sporting performance.
This project represents a marvellous scientific and sporting challenge, both in terms of its configuration and the short time frame in which it is taking place.
It also implies a conviction shared by the women and men of GENCI and the computing centers that make up the HPC universe: people are as crucial to the success of scientific projects as they are to sporting performance.