Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 11, 1992 TAG: 9202110132
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: By DAVID REED
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Medium
SLICKLY ENGINEERED
Two freshmen studying engineering at Virginia Tech will be watching TV intently this weekend when the two-man U.S. Olympic bobsled they helped design whooshes down the track in France."We're going to be watching it with an entirely new viewpoint," said Dan Sheridan of Great Falls.
During the past two summers, Sheridan and Dan Ancona of Annandale assisted architect Kevin Lynaugh of the Navy's David Taylor Research Center in a project to improve the bobsled's speed.
Lynaugh is a mentor in a Department of Defense apprenticeship program for high school students and chairman of the bobsled club at the research center. Scientists and engineers from Syracuse University and the Flight Research Institute in Seattle also were part of the voluntary, ongoing bobsled research.
"We started them with very low technical things at first, but they are pretty bright kids," Lynaugh said of Sheridan and Ancona. "They came up with some clever ideas. I can't say they came up with a patentable idea for resistance reduction. Without them, though, it would have been very hard."
The scientists and engineers worked on the bobsled project before and after business hours and on lunch breaks, Lynaugh said.
"The rewards are not monetary," he said. "They are the satisfaction of working with the students and watching them develop."
If the U.S. bobsled team wins a medal, "you can say, `Hey, maybe I have a small piece of that.' "
Sheridan said, "It's the closest thing you can do without actually being in the Olympics."
Lynaugh said the Olympic committee, which strictly regulates the size and shape of the bobsleds, approved the U.S. sled that had the least amount of drag in tests made during the research program.
"It is going to go faster, hopefully," Sheridan said. "A race can be decided in thousandths of a second, and any little thing can give you an edge."
The students used a wind tunnel to analyze aerodynamic problems and worked with computer models of a bobsled coming down a course. They used dummies to examine the effect of different seating positions for the driver and the brakeman.
"If you go up too high, you may hit a wall and lose speed," Sheridan said. "Stay too low and you may skid out or cut into the ice too deep and lose speed."
Ancona said vibration is a big problem. The sleds sometimes travel as fast as 90 mph on the U-shaped track and shake vigorously at times because of the friction between the ice and the sled's runners. That makes it difficult to maintain stability and speed.
"It doesn't have to be a major loss, like a crash," Sheridan said. "It's just something that could impair his ability to steer and thereby lose time."
Ancona said the research has helped him understand engineering concepts in class. "When I learn things in class, I think about how the principles can be applied to the bobsled project," he said.