Team 9159: Higher in the Air: Design of Snowboard Course

Team # 9159 page5 of 22
At last, to optimize the shape of the halfpipe, we take various requirements
into consideration, including construction difficulty, players’ safety and their performance.
2 Symbols, Hypothesis and Explanations
2.1 Symbols Used in this Paper
We list the quantities we use as follows. Some are geometric parameters of
the halfpipe, some are physical quantities in the sliding process. Symbols and
corresponding parameters are shown in Tab. 1 and Fig. 2.
Fig 2: Cross section of the halfpipe, perpendicular to the ground
2.2 Hypothesis
• We treat the snowboarder as a mass point with mass m, ignoring body twists
of snowboarder and other geometrical properties.
• The mass point moves right on the snowboard course rather than traveling
along the trajectory of the original gravity center of a snowboarder above the
snow surface.
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