Build: An Ivy League wave pool!

The smartest people in the world jump into the artificial wave game!

Kelly Slater is a very smart man with diverse opinions but is he Ivy League smart? For those amongst us who might confuse “Ivy League” with “World Surf League” allow me explain some differences.

The Ivy League is an eastern seaboard conference that includes some of the best colleges and universities in the United States. Schools like Harvard, Princeton, Brown and Yale. Only the brightest are allowed in and, there, work on curing cancer etc.

The World Surf League is a band of fun loving, yet mentally retarded, water dancers who splash in the ocean for points handed down by a motley crew of potentially more mentally retarded Australian and Brazilian judges.

But guess what? At Yale the students in the mechanical engineering and materials science department decided to take a break from serious matters in order to build the best wave pool ever!

Kelly Slater good? Let’s read about it on Yale’s website!

Although no surfer herself, Katherine Berry ’17, took on the challenge. She built a prototype with help from Schroers and Wilen with the goal of designing a ring-shaped surf park that would produce longer-running waves.

Her prototype is a 3-foot-by-3-foot-by-6-inch park base with a series of interchangeable underwater inserts, both made with polystyrene foam. A rotating arm made from PVC piping hangs overhead, pulling a small plow through the water to generate the waves. The base of the park is adjustable to produce a variety of wave sizes and shapes. 

This fall, Berry moves on to other things, though other students  may take up the project. A lot of progress was made in the spring, she said, but more work is needed on getting the waves to break. She’s hopeful that using a curved plow instead of the flat one of the current design would help correct this.

Berry said the project was a good way to demonstrate the far-reaching impacts engineering can have.

“It forced me to think about specialized needs for groups I am unfamiliar with inside a community, why those needs exist, and how to approach satisfying them without necessarily having a vested interest,” she said. “I think as an engineer it’s good to be exposed to unfamiliar projects, because throughout your career you’ll need to know how to ask the right questions to effectively and think through all kinds of diverse design problems that apply to groups beyond yourself.”

What the hell is she talking about? That language thing is hard to read and the pichure is not so clear.