every piece of wood has a different weight, different grains and grain direction, different water content/density to it....
epoxy is a mixture, is it always nailed? how many bubbles ended up in the mixture? epoxies like wood can be drastically different from each other.
how much heat was used to press the ski/board? for how long? how much resin came out during pressing? is it possible to even measure this? did the heat make it thru the entire board and was it uniform?
what grade of uhmw is the base? there are many, and was crown having a good day (or iso or whoever) when they made the run? how much recycled material did they add?
what grade is your steel? what hardness is it? full wrap? what is the cut and the dimensions of the profile of the edge?
all this stuff, its enough to make one crazy man. I think it would be awesome if you can come up with formulas that really truly work one day, but then again, that takes out some of the beauty of the craftsmanship going on here. I mean i think its awesome all the effort going into it but in the end its just ending up as reference material, but yea i'm rooting for you guys for sure.
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with all that said... anyway....
I used pro-Engineer with Pro-Mechanica when we did fea. I did it on the sidewalls of the board, so, after making the drastic assumption that the entire board would just consist of uhmw, for simplicity, we did fea on the heat going thru and into the board as a router was removing material at x rpm and x feed rate and x angle. It was pretty much just for show and tell though.
You might consider cutting up sections of a ski at some nominal location, maybe do this to a bunch of pairs of (donated!) modern skis, and run them on the uhhh, i cant remember the name, the machines that pull apart material and crush it, the ones that give you modulus of elasticity and all the curves and stuff. Then do a ton of samples, and come up with some kind of avg estimated moduluses and values for everything. Maybe press out a mock ski/board containing all the materials, resin, etc, but just a simple block shape, then cut that all up into smaller samples, after it's cured for a good week or two, then test those.
Then make some of the same with thinner wood, you might want to do them side by side with the same batches of epoxy and same heat, etc, so they're all the same, compare the values of the thick ones to the thin ones, maybe do it with a third one with thin core, it might give you enough of what you need to guess on what thickness is doing to everything
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doing FEA on a press frame, probably a lot simpler, but if you dont know the software, you could bang your head against the wall for a long time, you might want the assistance of a really good Mech Engineering / Mech Design student, or maybe the head of the CAD facility. If you havent done solid modeling with CAD, and you havent done FEA, it will take you more than your semester to even get started. Dont let me discourage you though, you can for sure build up a quick steel frame or whatever, and figure out if it's gonna be welded or bolted, and then apply forces @ the center (ie the bag @ xx psi) to see what it does to the whole system.
your best bet is to overbuild, someone mentioned safety factor >1, less than 1? I think if its below one isnt it already failed? rule of thumb, or goal for safety factors is 3 i believe. Its been a while. Anyway I'd definitely want something that could handle way more than the load applied. Ok time to breathe
