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LIAM McHUGH: For alpine skiers Heath Calhoun and Julia Mancuso,
it's all about speed.
JULIA MANCUSO: Going 80, 90 miles an hour
feels just awesome.
McHUGH: Mancuso has won eight major championship medals,
including three Olympic medals, the most ever by a woman alpine
skier. Paralympic skier and Iraq War veteran Heath Calhoun
competed in the 2010 Winter Paralympics in Vancouver and is
a medal favorite in Sochi.
HEATH CALHOUN: As a beginner skier, it's about making it down
the hill so that you can have fun and at this level it's
so much different.
McHUGH: For both athletes, the engineering and design of their
skis will be critical to their success at the 2014 Winter
Olympic - and Paralympic Games, especially when it comes to
hard-packed snow surfaces where vibrations and bumps on the
slope impact speed and performance.
MANCUSO: The vibrations definitely vary between snow
conditions if it's really icy or bumpy.
McHUGH: On the alpine ski slope, vibration is unavoidable and too
much can be a bad thing, impairing performance and
potentially costing athletes like Mancuso the gold.
KAM LEANG: Vibration causes the ski to lose contact with the
surface of the snow and that intermittent contact causes a
problem in terms of the skier being able to control the ski.
McHUGH: Kam Leang is an engineer at the University of Nevada,
Reno, who is funded by the National Science Foundation.
He and his team of graduate students are using
nano-composite materials to reduce unwanted vibration in
high performance skis.
LEANG: It allows you to go faster and feel more comfortable
and you could control the ski better.
McHUGH: A ski is already a composite. It is made of two or
more materials, like fiberglass and steel, that when combined
together form a new material with different chemical or
physical characteristics. But what makes Leang's research so
innovative is his use of NANO-scale carbon tubes.
LEANG: If you take your hair, the diameter of your hair is on
average about 100 microns, okay?
McHUGH: The carbon nanotubes Leang's team uses are between
10,000 and 100,000 times smaller in diameter than a hair on your
head. When combined with larger materials, nano-materials can be
used to improve the strength, flexibility and increase the
stability of anything from skis to car parts. Stronger than
steel and lighter than fiberglass, long, thin carbon
nanotubes are added to a glue called epoxy. The mixture holds
the layers of the ski together and helps spread out energy that
travels through the ski when a force is applied to it,
reducing unwanted vibrations.
LEANG: We've seen about anywhere between 10 to 15 percent
improvement in damping. That may not seem like a lot but it
can add up.
McHUGH: For Heath Calhoun, the vibration issue is more complex
because he does not have knees to help stabilize himself.
Instead, he must rely on his specially designed mono-ski to
do this for him.
CALHOUN: It never occurred to me that there was, you know,
disabled ski racing. And so I went in and I asked, "Where can
I take this?"
TOM WATSON: We're basically using technology between the
seated position and the ski to absorb bump forces.
McHUGH: Tom Watson is an off-road motorcycle engineer who
works on the Paralympic A team mono-skis. He designed a new
shock absorber system optimized for Health Calhoun.
WATSON: So I have to take into consideration what's happening
all the way from the snow to the rider's seated position.
McHUGH: Using a shock absorber that he initially created for
off-road motorcycles, Watson was able to tweak Calhoun's mono-ski
to help maintain contact with the snow.
WATSON: The ski can't go faster unless it's contacting the snow.
So the shock absorbers duty is to keep the ski in contact with
the snow as much as possible.
McHUGH: The shock absorber uses flexible plates to control the
amount of fluid that travels through the chamber. When
Calhoun hits a bump, fluid fills the chamber and helps him glide
over it, keeping him stable.
WATSON: The shock absorber doesn't actually control the
speed, but what it does do is controls the athlete's potential
to go faster.
McHUGH: On his mono-ski, Calhoun is able to reach speeds up to 70
miles per hour.
CALHOUN: Looking back on, I mean, I've completely
changed everything I did from then; the equipment, skis, to my
entire technique has changed.
McHUGH: With each Olympic Winter Games, engineers are improving
equipment, helping athletes like Heath Calhoun and Julia Mancuso
reach higher speeds, and perhaps even reach the medal podium.
MANCUSO: And now going into Sochi, I really feel, you know,
ready to perform and ready to win those gold medals.
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