Summary
Little safety driven engineering goes into the design and construction of ski and snowboard jumps in terrain parks at publicly accessible ski resorts. Catastrophic injuries and even deaths occur during skiing and snowboarding at these resorts. It is possible to design the landing surfaces of jumps such that the normal impact velocity on landing is capped at a safer value regardless of the jumper's takeoff speed and jump launch speed. These jump designs can still provide large maximum heights and flight durations for participant fun. We have designed a web application that laypeople can use to design and analyze ski jumps with specified equivalent fall height in mind.
| Theme | Sports Engineering | Current Researchers | |
| Last Worked On | August 2023 | Past Researchers | Jan van der Schot, Bryn Cloud, Britt Tarien |
| Collaborators | Bryn Cloud, Mont Hubbard, Chris Brown, Nicola Petrone, Danial Roeck |
Associated Research Products
Journal Articles:
- J. K. Moore and M. Hubbard, "skijumpdesign: A Ski Jump Design Tool for Specified Equivalent Fall Height," The Journal of Open Source Software, vol. 3, no. 28, p. 818, Aug. 2018, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00818.
Theses
- J. van der Schot, "The Relationship between Equivalent Fall Height and Ground Reaction Force in Freestyle Ski Jumping", MSc Thesis, Delft Unversity of Technology, 2023.
Preprints
- Moore, J., Cloud, B., Hubbard, M., & Brown, C. A. (2021, March 31). Safety-Conscious Design of Terrain Park Jumps: Ethical Issues and Online Software. https://doi.org/10.31224/osf.io/sq7u9
Conference Presentations:
- N. Petrone, J. K. Moore, and M. Hubbard, "The Equivalent Fall Height approach: towards validated tools for designing safer snowboard and freestyle skiing jumps", IOC World Conference on Prevention and Injury in Sport, Monaco, 25-27 Novemer 2021
- B. Cloud, B. Tarien, J. K. Moore, and M. Hubbard, "Accessible, Open-source Computational Analysis and Design of Terrain Park Ski Jumps," presented at the 23rd International Congress on Snow Sports Trauma and Safety, Squaw Valley, California, USA, Apr. 2019.
Software:
- Web application: http://www.skijumpdesign.info
- Ski jump simulation library and web application source code: https://gitlab.com/moorepants/skijumpdesign
Media
Screenshot of the ski jump design web application.
Prinoth advertisement video that features TU Delft student Jan van der Schot during his internship working with the flight trajectory design tools.
Example of a constant equivalent fall height jump, built in Italy under Nicola Petrone's leadershipe.
Constructing a constant equivalent fall height jump.
Group responsible for building the jumps and validating the theory!