Yahoo News This trick will stop your wheely suitcase falling over
When you're rushing to catch a plane or train, wheelie suitcases can't half slow you down, rocking from side to side before they humiliatingly topple over – and you miss whatever it is you're running for.
Now, just in time for holiday season, scientists have answered our travel prayers and told us how to stop it happening. Apparently, it's to do with how we're walking…
Researchers in France studied a model suitcase on a treadmill to find out exactly what happens when a wheeled suitcase travels at high speed, the BBC reports. They discovered that if a regular side-to-side swing develops, going faster led to smaller swings.
"Thus, one should accelerate rather than decelerate to attenuate the amplitude of oscillations," they conclude. "A non-experienced suitcase puller would not react this way. The outcome should not be dramatic for a suitcase, but it could be troublesome for a trailer towed by a vehicle."
The results, published in the the journal Royal Society Proceedings A, explain that instability of a two-wheeled bag occurs because the two wheels are fixed together on a rod.
"The friction force at the rolling wheels constrains wheels to roll without slipping," the report states. "This constraint imposes a coupling between the translational motion and the three-dimensional rotational motion of the suitcase that drives the rocking instability."
And this theory applies to more than just bags on wheels.
"The suitcase is a fun way to tackle the problem but the study would be the same for any trolley with two wheels or blades," Sylvain Courrech du Pont of Universite Paris-Diderot, who led the study, told BBC News. "So it will be the same for a caravan or maybe also for airplanes."
So next time you're lugging an unstable suitcase, it might be worthwhile speeding up.
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