Decoded: Why your shoe laces
keep coming undone
Do your shoe laces
keep coming undone even when you tie them the strongest way possible? You are
walking down the stairs of your office or are jogging in the apartment garden;
they keep flaring open in all glory, again and again. Why does that happen? Are
your weak tying skills to blame or something else? The engineers at University
of California Berkeley decode it for us.
Your poor tying is
not the reason it's happening. The mechanical engineers say that it happens due
to the force put by the foot on the ground combined with the force of swinging
or walking your legs.
To understand the happening of repeated knot untying, the experts used a slow-motion camera during their experiments. The force put by the feet first relaxes the knot; secondly they pull at the laces.
For the study, a
treadmill walk of the co-author Christine
Gregg was filmed. "The shoelace knot comes untied due to the same
sort of motion. The forces that cause this are not from a person pulling on the
free end but from the inertial forces of the leg swinging back and forth while
the knot is loosened from the shoe repeatedly striking the ground," Gregg
said.
A variety of laces are being used to conduct the same experiment and so
far, they all suffered the same issue. This could be the beginning of
understanding why certain laces could be better than others.
21.04.2017
A problem is a chance for us to
do our best
Duke Ellington
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