Design of a dynamic ice skate

Design of a dynamic ice skate

Jacobse, B.A.

Thomassen, E.W. (mentor)
Van Heur, R.J.H.G. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

Master of Science Integrated Product Design

2011-12-09

This report describes the results of a graduation project to design an ice skate featuring a dynamic bend in the blade in the lateral direction. To start an analysis was carried out in order to gain an understanding of the problems experienced with currently used ice skates in long track speed skating. It turned out that while conventional ice skates feature a permanent bend in the blade to assist the skaters in steering in the corners of the track and provide more grip, on the straights this bend leads to a problem with the left foot. Having established an understanding of this problem and related aspects the process to design a model featuring a dynamic bend in the blade was started. This quickly resulted in a functional principle that would be used during the rest of the project. In order to control the degree of the bend and prevent it from becoming to large leading to a skate that would be unusable, a number of ways to do this was thought up. Each of these was modelled in a 3D CAD design software package and submitted to loading simulations to discover their influence on the bend. After having found out which idea worked best, a physical model was created which would be used in tests on the ice. The tests showed that the model indeed performed the intended function but also identified new problems. It turned out that for the left foot, the bend in both lateral directions should be tuned individually to optimize the behavior of the skate for both the straights and the corners. Adaptations to the test model were made to enable these newly discovered functions. Although the new tuning function could not be tested on the ice due to the small, fragile parts used in the tuning method, a quick ‘lab-test’ did show that it was possible to achieve individual tuning of both sides. The tuning method was worked out further and materialized in a final design proposal for the dynamic ice skate concept.

ice-skate
design
dynamic bend

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8682c6f6-53aa-417e-acd2-38653039cce1

2012-12-09

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Jacobse, B.A.