Making (Winter) Sport Of
Engineering's Power and Finesse

Snowboarding is just one example of how the discipline of engineering plays a crucial role in winter sports. In fact, according to the National Engineers Week Committee, virtually every winter sport depends to a critical degree on the power and finesse of engineering. From a ski jump's slope to the curve of the blades on a hockey skate to a luge runner's gloves studded at the fingertips to allow extra grip during takeoff, the committee reports that engineering underpins a whole wide world of sports. In a brief review of the influence of engineering on winter sports, the National Engineers Week Committee found:

Engineers have long had the responsibility for solving urban traffic jams, but now they're being called to resolve a different kind of traffic jam far from city streets—ski slope jams. According to Beat (pronounced Bay-ott) vonAllmen, a civil engineer whose Salt Lake City firm designs and constructs ski resorts, the newly acquired ability of skis to make quick turns -- developed over the past few years as ski manufacturers appropriated the camber shape of snowboards, the key to making sharp turns—is wrecking havoc on the slopes. Where once resorts had to contend with essentially vertical movement, that is, from the top of the slope to the bottom, vonAllmen says they now must accommodate the side-to- side movement introduced by the ability to make quick and numerous turns.

"Before," says the engineer, "everyone was 'wedeling'—making short turns, using a relatively narrow traffic lane. Now, they're making 90-degree turns, using a much wider lane, creating a snowballing demand for space. When you look at an engineering problem you think of highway traffic. Now the ski industry must deal with this widening of skier traffic. In addition, the way snowboarders ride crooked on the board, they tend to veer into the other traffic much like a truck making a right turn with blocked mirrors.

Though they appear to be of a single piece, the helmets of hockey players are actually three different parts fitted together in an intricate geometric configuration refined over the years for maximum energy absorption. (To test the helmet's ability to attenuate impacts, manufacturers fit helmets with instrumental test heads and then drop them several meters. At the end of the drop—known as a "sudden deceleration"—the testers examine the helmet's level of protection and whether it has withstood impacts from 275 to 300 G-forces.) Besides protection, the helmet must also be light enough to keep the head cool, since hockey players are in constant rotation and release a great deal of heat through their head. Further, the lightness is important to allow the player to accelerate at high speeds and then, since the sudden stops of the player squares the effect of inertia, stop without tumbling off balance.

Most everyone knows that the bottom of hockey skates curve, but many may not realize that the profile of the curve changes throughout the blade. The overall blade is balanced between a nine- and 11-ft. radius to create the perfect balance of agility and speed—a shorter radius for more agility, a longer radius for more speed. Typically, though, the front of the blade is engineered with a shorter radius for landing, the center is longer, while the back returns to a shorter radius for sharp turns.

Though hockey skate blades are a single unit, outdoor speed skates are actually made up of two articulated pieces for speed. According to Blaine Hoshizaki, vice president of research and development for SLM International, a major equipment supplier to the U.S. Winter Olympics teams, the articulation is a performance enhancement of bio-mechanics, allowing it to "epitomize the characteristics of the range of motion" evidenced in muscle mechanics.

Luge runners must contend with slopes that range from 25 to 35 degress. The course at the Nagano Olympics will be close to a 30-degree slope. The moment of truth is takeoff, when hundredths of seconds saved can translate to three or four times that amount at the finish, often the winning difference. To help aid the speed of takeoff, racers wear gloves with 4mm spikes (about the size of thumbtacks) on the fingertips to help paddle down the ramp.

The perfect consistency of indoor ice rinks is thanks to the pioneering work of Milt Garland, a 102-year-old engineer who invented the first "shell" ice maker, that is, one that would form ice on the exterior of a casing instead of inside it. Garland, known in the industry as "Mr. Refrigeration," continues to work part time at the Frick Company, a subsidiary of York International, where he serves as a consultant. Ice in rinks is frozen by an ammonia-chilled glycol solution that runs through piping beneath the rink. Temperatures hover around 40 degrees F., with humidity levels in the upper 50s. This combination ensures that the rink is frost free.

Needless to say, winter sports means dealing with extreme cold, so making the right clothing is crucial. Thinsulate, developed in the early 1960s by 3M, has evolved into one of the most successful insulation materials ever developed. Though the technique is rather simple—air trapped among the fibers is warmed by the body's heat—the key to Thinsulate's warmth is that the microfibers, which have a diameter of less than 10 microns (a human hair is 100 microns), trap more air in less space than traditional synthetic cloth insulation.

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