"Engineers Achieve Olympic Feats in Preparation for Winter Games"
by Jennie Ganz, Staff Writer of the Engineering Times, the magazine of the NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers)
Reprinted by permission.

When the 2002 Olympic Winter Games open on February 8 in Salt Lake City, the world will be able to see 17 days of athletic feats and accomplishment. What many people may not realize, however, is that there are an untold number of professional engineers whose own feats have in some way contributed to the Olympic Games. You won't see these people on the medal stand, but there wouldn't be an Olympics without the work of engineers.

When NSPE member and Professional Engineer Tom McNamee attends the bobsled and luge competitions during the Games, he'll watch them with a sense of pride. A civil engineer and a past president of the Utah Society of Professional Engineers, McNamee played a key role in building the bobsled, skeleton, and luge track in the Bear Hollow area of Park City, Utah, for the 2002 Olympic Games. Construction began in the summer of 1995 and was completed in the summer of 1997.

.Snow made by Scott Barthold, P.E.'s company, Sno.Matic Controls and Engineering in Lebanon, New Hampshire, will be used for the Utah Olympic Park's ski jumps. The bobsled, skeleton, and luge track in Lake Placid, New York, was largely designed by Clough, Harbour & Associates, led by Ray Rudolph, P.E., and Dennis Hilton, P.E.

At the time the track was built, McNamee was manager of materials testing for AGRA Earth and Environmental in Utah. The firm provided geotechnical and materials engineering services on the project, as well as testing and inspection services. McNamee directed the testing and inspection staff and served as a materials engineer for the project owner, the State of Utah Division of Facilities Construction Management.

The track, a $25 million project that measures 4,400 feet with a vertical drop of 390 feet, was made from reinforced concrete with embedded tubes that carry refrigeration fluid to maintain ice on the track. In the flat sections of the track, conventional concrete was placed using the typical form-and-pour placement techniques. "The challenge was how to place concrete in the curved vertical sections of the track," McNamee says.

The solution was shotcrete, which originated in the early 1900s and has been used in many applications, from the construction of tunnels, swimming pools, and domes to the rehabilitation of bridges. Shotcrete differs from conventional concrete in that it is put in place by using a high-pressure spray system rather than pouring it into forms.

Shotcrete, which is typically used in the construction of bobsled tracks, was necessary because it can be applied in the C-shaped turns that can reach 10-feet tall. "The track constantly changes shape as it transitions from a straight away into the curve then back into the straight away. One of the challenges was getting concrete in between and around the refrigeration tubes and the reinforcing steel," says McNamee.

NSPE member Tom McNamee played a major role in designing and building Utah Olympic Park's bobsled, skeleton, and luge track.

In the vertical sections of the track, the track consists of a layer of reinforcing steel spaced very close together with a layer of refrigeration tubes. The construction process was to place a layer of wire mesh near the center of the track section, typically on the outside edge of the refrigeration tubes. This served as backboard form for the shotcrete. Shotcrete was then sprayed onto the inside face of the track.

"The shape of the curve was controlled by using a series of templates bent in the shape of the finished inside face," says McNamee. "After the concrete had set up on the inside face, the loose material that had gone through the mesh was removed and the same process was repeated on the outside."

As the materials engineer, McNamee worked with the contractor, providing recommendations for the shotcrete mix designs and application methods, and at the completion of the project, the team performed a condition survey of the track for final acceptance.

"It gives me a sense of pride to know that some of my work went into building the facility," says McNamee. "It takes a lot of cooperation between the owner, engineers, contractors, and sport federation personnel to make this possible, and it was a fun and interesting project to be involved with."

The Snow Man

Since he was a kid, Professional Engineer Scott Barthold has loved snow and skiing. Later, as a student at Dartmouth College, he found the excitement of engineering. "I had an idealist viewpoint and I liked fixing things and solving problems, and engineering seemed like a good match of those things," he says.

Today, Barthold has a job that allows him to combine his love of snow and engineering. As president of Sno.Matic Controls and Engineering in Lebanon, New Hampshire, Barthold is the man behind the snow that will appear on the ski jumps at the Utah Olympic Park.

Barthold, a mechanical engineer, got into the snowmaking business after he graduated in 1981. "I studied a lot of thermodynamics and fluids and I was just really interested in snowmaking," he says. "I was pretty surprised that anybody could actually make a living at it."

He explains that snowmaking is a process of uniformly spraying water into the air and giving it enough projection that the droplets freeze before hitting the ground. "The basic process is simple, but when you get into the overall design, it gets a little more complicated," he says.

Barthold's main design challenge for the Olympics was to maintain a uniform snow profile over the steep and narrow ski jumps. "They go through all sorts of efforts designing the hill to construct it in just the right profile," he says. "The last thing you want to do is make a huge pile of snow in the middle of it and then try to push it around so that it matches that profile."

At the base of the ski jump, where it's wider and flatter, Barthold installed a fan-type snowmaking machine, which creates piles of snow and can be moved easily to areas where it's needed. On the steeper sections Barthold has installed a traditional snowmaking machine, which mixes compressed air with water inside a chamber. As the air expands out through a nozzle, the water breaks into a spray that projects it up to 15 feet.

When Barthold made the trip to the Utah Olympic Park last month to make sure his snowmaking equipment was in order, he was impressed to see the years of preparation coming together. "It's really inspiring to look at all of the engineering and all of the construction that's gone on for any of the events," he says, "and just to have any part of that feels great."

Bobsled Engineers

You won't see Professional Engineers Ray Rudolph and Dennis Hilton listed as coaches for the U.S. bobsled, luge, or skeleton (a kind of head-first luge) teams, but in a way their work has helped these teams prepare for the Salt Lake City Games. Rudolph and Hilton are partners in the Albany, New York engineering firm Clough, Harbour & Associates LLP, which designed the new track in Lake Placid, New York, where these teams train.

The new track opened in February 2000 and replaced an outdated course designed for the 1980 Olympic Winter Games. The track, measuring 1,360 meters long, has 21 curves and consists of 4,000 cubic yards of concrete, 200 miles of reinforced steel, and 55 miles of ammonia gas refrigeration piping.

Hilton says the firm had to meet an aggressive schedule-it completed the design and construction of the track in about 14 to 16 months, when similar international-caliber tracks have taken two years to complete.

Clough, Harbour & Associates LLP also had the challenge of designing one track that would meet the different international requirements for bobsled and luge. Rudolph explains that bobsled and luge are very different sports that use the same venue. Creating a design that allows the owner, in this case the Olympic Regional Development Authority, to attract events for both sports is not easy. The shapes of the curves and the length of the run were both subjects of great discussion. "It was a matter of working, curve by curve, with the technical people in both federations to allow us to come up with a design that would make both sports happy," says Rudolph.

Rudolph has even personally tested out the track. He drove down the entire track in a bobsled before the 2000 Winter Goodwill Games. "It was pretty interesting. I've been on amusement park rides and they weren't anything like that," he says. "After having seen every piece of the track being constructed you tend to know it and trust it."

Rudolph and Hilton have received many compliments on the track from athletes, coaches, and federations. "The athletes all rave about the track," says Julie Urbansky, media and public relations director of the United States Bobsled and Skeleton Federation in Lake Placid.

"You have to steer the whole way down it," says skeleton athlete and Olympic hopeful Tristan Gale, 21, of Salt Lake City, Utah. "There are no straightaways. It just goes curve, curve, curve-it's great fun."

Engineering Professor Builds Olympic Torch

A major event in every Olympics is the relay of the Olympic torch and the lighting of the Olympic cauldron at the opening ceremony. While many will see the torch come through their hometowns prior to the Games in Salt Lake City or see it on TV, few may know that the torch itself is an engineering achievement.

Mechanical engineering professor Sam Shelton of Georgia Tech examines the Olympic cauldron that will carry the Olympic flame at various points through the torch relay.

The torch is the creation of Georgia Tech mechanical engineering professor Sam Shelton, who also built the Olympic torch for the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. "It was a unique engineering project and it has a lot of unique constraints. Number one, it becomes the icon that [is displayed] for a long time before the Olympics in that particular city. People ask me why they don't use the torch from the last Olympics, but each city has its own identity and its own icons," says Shelton.

Shelton adds that the second major challenge is mass-producing a torch while maintaining its artistic nature. He explains that torchbearers keep the torch they carried, so approximately 12,000 torches must be produced. "They don't pass the torch, they pass the flame," Shelton explains.

The Olympic torch is first lit in a ceremony in Olympia, Greece, and the flame must be carried unextinguished to Salt Lake City. Several safety lanterns are lit during the ceremony in Greece, in case the flame is extinguished along the torch relay.

For 65 days, beginning December 4, more than 11,500 people will carry the Olympic torch on a 13,500-mile journey from Greece through the United States to Salt Lake City. There, the torch will light the Olympic cauldron on February 8 and open the 2002 Olympic Winter Games.

Axium, a Los Angeles design firm, created the artistic concept of the torch. It was Shelton's task to transform the design concept, a fiery icicle, into a well-functioning instrument.

The body of the torch is tapered with an antique silver finish, and dark-shaded grooves run from top to bottom. The Salt Lake City logo, Olympic rings, and the text, "Light the fire within," are etched into the front.

The outer shell is made from aluminum and plating to produce a polished chrome finish. For the first time in the history of the Olympics, the torch is topped with a glass crown from which the Olympic flame emerges from a copper cauldron. The flame is visible from within the crown.

The glass crown posed a unique engineering challenge. The torch was not designed to burn from the top; rather, the flame emerges from within the torch and through a glass crown, echoing the theme of the Games: "Light the Fire Within."

Shelton also had to produce a valve-and-burner system for inside the torch that would prevent the flame from being extinguished under extreme conditions-such as temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit and as high as 80 degrees Fahrenheit, gusting winds, heavy rain, and high altitudes.

To the best of his knowledge, the flame has stayed lit. "Right now with the memory of the New York attacks, the flame holds incredible symbolism to everyone you see along the route of the relay," he says. "People stand and have tears coming down their faces as I did in Greece when I saw it lit for the first time. The flame has a magical quality."