With the aim of challenging some myths about wetsuit buoyancy, Prof Huub Toussaint and the team at wetsuit company Huub have released a white paper. With limited data available in the marketplace, and to assess any claims that could be made about wetsuit buoyancy, the authors – Huub Toussaint, Erik Simons, Merel Toussaint and Dean Jackson – have conducted their own research into the buoyancy of different wetsuit materials.
Summary:
- The buoyancy effect of 8 types of wetsuit materials were assessed
- Different materials with different thicknesses were obtained and so the results were corrected
- To make a fair comparison of the buoyancy of each material – compensating for differences in patch size and thus material used – the results were expressed relative to: the area, the mass, and relative to the volume of each patch
- This comparison of different materials showed that differences in buoyancy effect exist if the buoyancy is expressed per area of used material. Here, two factors determine the differences: material thickness and the intrinsic buoyancy of the material itself (i.e. buoyancy/volume)
- Some advertisements, which proclaimed buoyancy benefits of certain wetsuit materials were not substantiated in the test
The authors hope that the findings from their research can assist in the correct comparison of wetsuits available in the market.
Huub CEO, Dean Jackson said, “In the constant search for improvement and development for better materials and increased performance, it’s important that any company has clarity on the benchmarks of the materials used. Clearly, you cannot make informed decisions unless the quality of the data is accurate.
“With this in mind here at Huub we reached out to find data from one of the worlds leading wetsuit neoprene manufacturers. Amazingly no information was available at the time (we don’t think any still is) and so we decided to investigate for ourselves and find out what the benchmarks we were working with are.”
He continued, “What was most surprising was that claims of air filled neoprene are in fact not true; claims of over 30% increases in buoyancy did not come anywhere close to the actual findings of the test. The test also confirmed that materials with expected high buoyancy from our research did indeed give those results.
“After all this, let’s not forget additional buoyancy does not mean better swimming for all… but it does help to understand the numbers and options available.”
