Contact: Kathie Dibell
570-577-3260
[email protected]
LEWISBURG, Pa. -- Bucknell engineering students are developing tests to help a fledgling York snowboard manufacturer produce better boards, including ones that may go faster and boards tailored to certain groups of riders such as women.
Walbridge Design and Manufacturing, only two years old, seeks to carve its niche in the 3.6 million snowboarders' market. Research and development in designing new boards is what Walbridge has targeted, said Cary Briggs, company president.
Walbridge's 10 employees produced 3,000 snowboards last year, he said, but the company realizes it can't compete with major manufacturers that turn out 50,000 snowboards annually. Bucknell is creating prototype testing equipment for Walbridge to test board designs.
"Because of the Bucknell project, we will be able to offer something truly unique," Briggs said. "Next year, we'll be the ones pushing the envelope."
Despite the phenomenal growth of snowboarding in the past two decades, technology has not kept pace in improving the board, said Briggs. New boards are undertested, and overengineered. "Manufacturers buy expensive fibers, make a new board, then go out and have kids ride it. We didn't get good feedback. It wasn't scientific."
With the new testing equipment that Bucknell engineering students are developing, Briggs said, "We will be able to build boards that are lighter, faster and stronger without overengineering."
Pennsylvania's Ben Franklin Partnerships, which provides funds to new businesses and had already helped the firm improve its factory, suggested last year that Briggs talk to Bucknell engineers about designing the testing system.
Briggs told them, "Our first focus is to build a snowboard that will hug the snow" which could increase speed. Then Walbridge wants to address the women's market. "That segment has really been neglected, other than making boards lighter and painting them pink," he said."We want to test and build a board that responds to the physical differences between men and women."
Steven Shooter, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and Keith Buffinton, associate professor of mechanical engineering, put together a proposal whereby engineering students, as a senior design project, would create both a computer program and a robot to test new snowboards. Ben Franklin agreed to fund the project through the Small Business Development Center at Bucknell.
A professional rider who says a board "stokes or a board is bad is not providing useful information in driving the design technique," Shooter said. "A subjective opinion doesn't help you figure out the next step. Our job is to figure out what makes the good, good, and the bad, bad."
The Bucknell team comprises four senior mechanical engineering students, two senior electrical engineering students, four mechanical engineering graduate students and two mechanical engineering juniors. The four senior mechanical engineers are the core group.
The students first designed a field test of Walbridge's current snowboards to find out what actually happens on the mountain. They mounted strain gauges, sensors and accelerometers on boards to measure strain and vibrations. During winter break, the students and professional riders took the wired boards to the ski resort at Seven Springs to see how the boards performed in various maneuvers on the slopes.
With the data collected in the field test, the students began to construct in the laboratory a robot that simulates the board's action on the slopes -- turns, jumps, stops. The robot replaces the rider and gathers data at the same time.
Meanwhile, students also were creating a computer model to simulate the snowboard and the vibrations and stress on the board. The board characteristics and stresses and vibrations could then be manipulated to figure out by computer the effect, say, of adding more carbon to the board.
"By computer testing and lab testing, we have the ability to change the design more quickly, go back and forth from the computer to the lab to the field," Buffinton said. "You can do a what-if analysis and then physically build and test the board. We'll always need to go out to the slope, but this will eliminate much of the time element."
Fred Luchsinger, a senior from Frederick, Md., has been snowboarding for about 14 years. He figured he'd have to give up snowboarding while he was a mechanical engineering student. "Now I can do both at Bucknell. It's really great. The first boards were really primitive. Already I see a lot of improvement. Now we can make a difference, be on the cutting edge."
Blair Sutton, a junior mechanical engineering student from Lawrence, Kan., is an eight-year veteran on the boards, and he and Luchinger discussed some of the changes that can be made in the existing boards: tinkering with the shape, adding carbon strips, putting rubber on the edges to minimize vibrations. "You don't want the board to keep vibrating like old shocks in a car," Sutton explained. All these changes are being tested in the lab.
"We're getting there," Buffinton said.
Besides the snowboard team, other senior engineering classes have participated in the project. The mechatronics class developed a fatigue tester to see how long it takes a board to break down. The vibration class figured out what accelerometers to place on the board and then simulated the vibration tests on the computer.
Shooter said the project is so much fun for the students "they don't even realize how much they've learned. It also demonstrates that engineering isn't just working on a boring project. There is a real need for engineers in the sports industry. With the increase in the competitive spirit there's a demand for better performance. As soon as they get technical, engineers step in."
Briggs noted that snowboarding is still the fastest growing winter sport, and the demographics are changing from the adolescent boy dressed in baggy grunge clothes to include the boy's parents, sister and girlfriend. He estimates the snowboard market at 300,000 to 400,000 in the annual number of boards sold in the United States alone.
Unlike the ski industry which has 100 years or so of data, snowboard design has a long way to go, Briggs said. Walbridge wants to be the innovator of the snowboard industry, the company that does the R&D for other companies which would pay Walbridge a premium for helping design their boards and build 5,000 for their samples and their performance boards. "The whole Bucknell project is a key part of that strategy," he said.
Briggs, 45, became interested in snowboarding "as a natural progression" from working in ski industry sales since the 1970s. However, Briggs himself doesn't ride; he's a skier.
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(Editors: Photos of snowboarder field testing board on slopes and/or of students from Maryland and Kansas and professors in laboratory available by e-mail attachment, or snail mail. Contact Kathie Dibell, [email protected])
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