The complete measurement chain from HBM was used in the Olympic bobsled run at San Sicario near Turin to provide record performance in the ice channel. The task: measuring acceleration in the bends. The target: optimising the bends in the ice channel. Data was acquired under live conditions during a World Cup race.
The Turin ice channel comprises 19 bends, 114 meters in height difference and enables maximum speeds of up to 130 km/h. Record performance is what the San Sicario Olympic ice channel demands of athletes. However, high standards also have to be met during the measurements on the bobsled run. Therefore, the complete measurement chain from HBM was used for acceleration tests in the bends of the bobsled run during the World Cup race in January 2005.
The aim of the tests at San Sicario was to monitor the vibration behaviour of the concrete structure and to draw conclusions for optimising the bends. For this purpose, acceleration during the runs had to be measured in several bends.
Because of the limited number of runs during the race, the test was also a race against time. Thus, the use of particularly flexible and reliable test equipment was essential. The engineers of SeaTech Snc in charge of accomplishing the measurements therefore decided to use the flexible complete solution provided by HBM: B12 acceleration transducers in conjunction with the MGCplus amplifier system and the catman® software for data analysis.
SeaTech combined three B12 acceleration transducers from HBM to obtain a triaxial sensor that was then simply clamped on to the free ends of the concrete steel reinforcement. The MGCplus amplifier was located on the bed of a pickup truck. SeaTech engineers were able to drive to the different measuring points with their truck to acquire the test data on site in a safe and reliable way.
The MGCplus device was connected to a notebook PC via Ethernet. All data was saved directly to the hard disk and evaluated using catman® software – a gain in safety and flexibility. A total of 7 MB of data was recorded at a sampling rate of 2,400 Hz.
The MGCplus’s flexible trigger function made it possible to consider the relevant parts of the measurement only when making a frequency analysis in catman® for visualizing the resonance state of the structure.
The tests with two-man and four-man bobsleds during the 23 runs of the World Cup race were successful: The concrete structure of the bobsled run exhibited only good vibration behaviour.