Undergrad research project aims at producing the most exciting coaster ride

Roller coaster car engineering team members pose with adviser Professor Andy Ruina, right, in his lab in 309 Kimball Hall. The team, clockwise from the top, includes mechanical and aerospace engineering majors Neda Burapavong, Jaclyn Engelman, Wilfred Lo, Brett Lee, and Chris Consolati. The team plans on building a working model of a roller coaster car in the spring 2001 semester. Charles Harrington/University Photography

By Jeff Evans '01

In the fall of 1999, Cornell Presidential Research Scholars Neda Burapavong and Jaclyn Engelman began thinking about a new way of thrilling roller coaster enthusiasts.

And they started to devise a new kind of roller coaster car that would hang underneath a roller coaster track and would rotate in a somersaulting motion around the cylindrical track, spinning two side-by-side riders head over heels through an axis centered at the stomach.

Three semesters later, the design has been named Vertigo, an original and innovative car and seat assembly for a roller coaster. Next semester an actual working model will be built. "It will be just a prototype, so it's not necessarily going to look exactly like the real thing," said Engelman.

In the process, seniors Burapavong and Engelman have been joined by seniors Wilfred Lo and Chris Consolati and junior Brett Lee, who, like the two women, are mechanical and aerospace engineering majors. The additions of three new members allows the team to divide up the research more evenly, allowing each member to focus on certain areas of the project. Andy Ruina, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics, advises the team by giving critical assessments of the design and occasional assistance with difficult calculations and problems.

"This project really does integrate a lot of different coursework -- plus it's fun, exciting and interesting," said Engelman.

The two women became interested in the project when they decided to do something more applied, hands-on and less theoretical than they had been doing in prior semesters. They found that the Presidential Research Scholars program "paved a lot of connections and created a lot of opportunity," said Burapavong.

The design consists of one chair on each side of a support that is attached to the roller-coaster track, with bearings that attach the seats to the support and permit the two seats to rotate around the track. "The question we're working on right now is deciding how and when to make it spin as it's going around the track," said Burapavong. By doing this, the group can either let the twists and turns of the track create enough torque to spin the seats or decide where machines could exert control over the spinning seats.

"Our final goal is to build a working model of the car and a short section of the track so that we can actually take a very short, maybe five-second, ride on it," said Engelman. Depending on how the working model of the car and seat assembly pan out, the group might take their design to the roller coaster industry to gauge its reaction to their ideas -- and possibly to finance the working model.

The conceptual design of a roller coaster car created by a team of Cornell engineering students shows two seats, at far left and right. A ladder-like support, connected to the cylindrical track at top, holds the seats in place and allows the seats to spin as they go around the track. Jaclyn Engelman, Neda Burapavong

In order to help the undergraduate team see how the car and seats would function on a real track, the group uses software called Working Model. The program allowed them to build the roller coaster in two dimensions and then analyze the forces created as the car and seat assembly goes around a track.

Safety also has been a concern in the design because sufficiently high G-forces (force measured as a multiple of the Earth's gravitational force on a person) involved in the circular motion of the seats could cause riders to black out. The research team's seats are designed, however, to rotate at a safe angular velocity of no more than one revolution per second.

The research group purchases materials through funding provided by the Bartels family of Cornell, United Technologies Corp. and the Cornell Presidential Research Scholars program.