Project Description: The goal of this project is to technically characterize the performance of snowboards. In other words, we want to understand the materials and properties that make a good snowboard good and a bad snowboard bad. Traditional approaches to new snowboard design and development can be time consuming and expensive. Through this project we develop techniques and equipment to provide information to increase performance and decrease development costs and time to market. We followed a three-pronged approach for this project to gather information from the slopes and facilitate new product development: field testing on the slopes, robotic testing in the laboratory, and computer modeling.
RECOGNITION:
Won the 2000 Pennsylvania Small Business Development Center Star Performer Award (only award given per year)
Blair Sutton won the 2000 ASME National Student Design Paper Award for his description of the project. He presented his paper at the ASME World Congress in Disneyworld.
Project has appeared in numerous magazines and newspaper articles.