Good afternoon, our team today is going to present the design of the alpine ski. Firstly, I am going to give a brief introduction and background of skiing. Over the years, the revolution of skis has been constantly changing and improving due to the rapid improvement in its technology such as the release bindings and double shell boots. Such breakthrough coupled with the advancement in materials was one of the key factors in the development of the ski industry.
Our design project has focused on some of the current problems over the recent years. World Alpine Ski sales are holding about 6 million pairs of ski a year and such stagnation is caused by an aging skier population, hence the popularity of alpine skiing among the youths is decreasing. In addition, safety issues are also a concern as 90% of the injuries is due to alpine skiing itself. This has resulted over 17000 alpine skiing injuries over the recent years.
Our challenge to this problem statement is to attract the younger recreational skiers to Alpine Skiing by improving the performance and ski safety issues. We will focus mainly on a more lightweight ski with better control and stability such as adding high damping to insulate vibrations and also to make it cheaper and of course increase the safety of usage.
Firstly, what are the factors affecting ski performance? I will briefly touch on 2 points. One is the mechanical behavior and the other, the external factors. Mechanical behavior of the skis include the torsional rigidity where it measures the stiffness being twisted along the longitudinal axis; the flex which is the bend from which a force is applied; the swingweight which is the moment of inertia about the vertical axis of the boots; the bending stiffness and torsional stiffness which gives a distribution of the load at any point.
External factors include ski pressure on the snow, skier load distribution on the snow and temperature of the snow and lastly, the ski vibrations which my group...