During the spring and summer of 2017, I was part of a 12 student team to design and construct a rollercoaster. With a partner (Kerrie W.), I co-led the 4 person cart team. I taught the younger engineers mechanical properties, statics and some dynamics so they could help Kerrie and I do calculations on the cart. We originally designed a cart in steel that would be welded together and have 6 degrees of freedom to accommodate for motion during the ride, but due to budget constraints and time (and none of us knew how to weld, and couldn't learn that summer :( ), we had to change to an all-wood design. As our rollercoaster design changed as well over the course of the project it was a fun time to interface with the track team and make sure the calculations we were doing for the cart would accommodate for the changes in track design - for the new forces along the curved path the coaster would take.
I CAD'ed and made drawings for the coaster's cart and advised on the track's calculations as a senior engineer on the team. Over the course of the week-and-a-half build time, I built the cart with kerrie, and together we performed safety tests on unloaded and loaded carts before confirming it was safe to ride for humans.
Though I was not the sole operator of the coaster (putting people on the cart, taking them off, resetting everything, etc...) I made sure every person who was operating it was safe to do so and knew what to do. On top of that I would run daily inspections of the cart to see if there was any change in the state of the wood, the connections or any safety hazards.
Here's a bit more about the project, and some photos of it!
We used a race-car seat and created a 5-point harness attached to the cart to keep the rider safe. Here is one of the engineering drawings we made for the BOM, construction and planning of the cart. This is an all wood cart (with metal braces), and reflects the changes we made to the cart design after switching from steel to wood.
Creating and testing the 5-pt harness!
In addition to building the cart, I was heavily involved in building and safety of the coaster itself. Here's some photos of it going up.
And just for fun, here's some CAD and drawings of the original track plans and cart plan. We had high goals but budget, time and safety concerns made us change materials and geometries of almost everything as we developed the ideas more. I'd be happy to talk about the long and hard decision process that took place in the changes if you want to hear about that.
