Ski Builders Forum

Philippe Mastrogiuseppe of McGill University, Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics, Montréal, Québec, has submitted a contribution entitled: "The effects of core material and thickness on the performance and behaviour of a ski".

It can be downloaded here in PDF format:
http://www.skibuilders.com/articles/

The results are interesting and may spark some discussion. Special thanks to Philippe for sharing his work.

This is great. At least two people have posted computer models that predict a skis longitudinal stiffness profile based on its construction (and i have one that i haven't posted), but not much work has been done on torsional stiffness. I'm sure we could back up Philippe's result by hitting the engineering books and coming up with a model that predicts torsional stiffness based on construction... that would give us a really good idea on how to make torsionally rigid skis.

Also, as far as I know, nobody on this website has done any quantitative work on damping. Phillipe's experiment is a great start. I feel like damping is a very complicated aspect of ski performance, and if we could understand it better we could make our skis better too. My physics is getting rusty, but I've been reading up on damping... if I figure out anything good I'll be back with more.

I love it when it gets quantitative guys, good stuff Philippe.

This is pretty well done for an undergraduate. The damping test is a joke however.
Great as a resource.

i think this has been posted on the forum before, but it's relevant, so i'll post it again.

this guy has done his PhD thesis skis by making FEM/FEA models of skis and testing his results with real skis, pretty cool. He goes so far as to model the effect of bindings and the interaction between the ski and the snow. He doesn't talk about ski vibrations, though.

whoops, forgot to put the link:

FINITE ELEMENT SIMULATION OF A CARVING SNOW SKI:
http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/eth:28070