Designing The Perfectly Smooth Roller Coaster Ride
One of the challenges that roller coaster designers face is controlling the forces their passengers experience as they take the ride.
The forces in a vertical plane are simple to state. They are the sum of the gravitational force pulling down and any centrifugal force that depends on radius of curvature and acts normally to the track.
The easiest track to design is circular but this causes a problem, “In practice this leads to unpleasantly large time variation of the normal force,” say Arne Nordmark and Hanno Essat the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. So designers are forced to rely on other more complex shapes, such as the clothoid.
So a reasonable question to ask is what shape should the tracks be to deliver a constant smooth normal force to a passenger taking the ride. Such a roller coaster would offer the perfect smooth ride.
(A curious feature of Nordmark and Essat’s analysis of this problem is that they say it is related mathematically to Kepler’s problem of planetary motion. Who’d have guessed.)
The answer, say the Swedes, is the shapes in the picture above. These do not yet appear to have a name–Nordmark and Essat call them Case 1 trajectories. Readers of the arXiv Blog will surely have better ideas. Suggestions in the comments section please.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1007.1394: The Comfortable Roller Coaster – On The Shape Of Tracks With Constant Normal Force
Keep Reading
Most Popular
Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.
And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.
The problem with plug-in hybrids? Their drivers.
Plug-in hybrids are often sold as a transition to EVs, but new data from Europe shows we’re still underestimating the emissions they produce.
Google DeepMind’s new generative model makes Super Mario–like games from scratch
Genie learns how to control games by watching hours and hours of video. It could help train next-gen robots too.
How scientists traced a mysterious covid case back to six toilets
When wastewater surveillance turns into a hunt for a single infected individual, the ethics get tricky.
Stay connected
Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.