Engineering a medal bid

16 February 2010 | By Ellie Zolfagharifard

On 18 February, Kristan Bromley, a former BAE Systems engineer, will be hurtling down one of the fastest and most terrifying ice runs to ever feature in the Winter Olympics.

He’ll do this head first at speeds of up to 90mph on a thin steel frame that will lift his body just inches above the ice. For a trained aerospace engineer this may seem an unlikely career choice, but for the man also known as ‘Dr Ice’, the move to skeleton bobsleigh has been a natural progression from an early and consuming interest in performance technology.

‘My first run on skeleton was back in 1996 while I was working as an engineer on a sled design for the British Bob Skeleton Association,’ said Bromley. ‘I was a graduate trainee at the time and more familiar with aircraft production and aerodynamics than skeleton racing. When I turned up in Altenberg with my sled, none of the athletes were available to test it, so I volunteered to do it myself.’

Since that run, Bromley has enjoyed a dizzying climb to the top of his sport, becoming a two-time Olympian and 2008 skeleton world champion. In the same year, he won the European Championships and World Cup series, making him the first man in the history of the sport to win the triple crown. However, he has also held firm to his engineering roots, providing the brains and brawn behind the 2010 British skeleton Olympic bid by designing equipment through his company, Bromley Technologies.

Am I more of an athlete or an engineer? — I would rather class myself as an innovator

Kristan Bromley

‘It’s difficult to say whether I’m more of an athlete or engineer,’ said Bromley. ‘I think I would rather class myself as an innovator, because innovation is what drives things forward and is the real key to my success. I do feel I have an advantage with my engineering background — the language an athlete uses with himself is intuitive and that can be difficult to communicate to an engineer. The downside to that is you can be easily pulled into the numerate side and forget to be an athlete.’

The importance of communication between athlete and engineer has led Bromley to bring in the expertise of Dan Fleetcroft, a former Ferrari F1 engineer whose knowledge of working with the requirements of racers has proved crucial in modifying the latest sled design. It is his bespoke approach that the British team hopes will give it the technical edge come February when a tenth of a second could mean the difference between receiving a medal and returning home empty handed.

‘Aerodynamics is key to shaving tenths of a second off the time,’ said Fleetcroft. ‘The only engine we have is the athlete’s 20m sprint at the top of the run and after that everything is about efficiency. We’re working with an F1 team at the moment to use their wind tunnel. We’re also using in-house computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and have just started to link Finite Element Analysis (FEA) and CFD in packages together to improve accuracy.’

One of the challenges Fleetcroft faces during aerodynamic analysis is modelling the athlete’s position within the CFD facilities. This requires the athlete to lie still for long periods while their body position is scanned into a computer. With racers battling 5 G-forces in some corners, understanding how easy it is for them to maintain a position is crucial to successful sled design. This understanding has become even more important in recent years, with the introduction of regulations governing the use of standard steel frames and banning coatings.

‘Regulation changes have meant that we’re pursuing aerodynamics far more aggressively,’ he said. ‘Developments in composites have allowed us to exploit shapes even further, but a big issue we still face is sensitivity. You see this a lot in F1 and it’s the same in Skeleton. Often designs have a very small geometric window where they function — any slight change to the environment on the track and they perform much worse than you originally thought.’

To combat this sensitivity, Bromley Technologies has enlisted the help of Boeing’s Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre to machine components at tight tolerances and in short lead times. The team at Bromley is also making use of Boeing’s expertise in composites to develop a material that provides tight control with minimal friction on an ice run. Typically, materials research done at the centre is used on a template sleigh pan that is tested in ice conditions at Bromley’s laboratory.

Unlike most of the leading skeleton teams, the UK lacks access to most of the winter tracks featuring in the Olympic and World Cup races, meaning designs have to be right first time. To compensate, Bromley has turned to the likes of F1 teams and Boeing, as well as developing his own skeleton-bobsleigh simulator, which he hopes will allow his engineers to make faster and more accurate decisions.

‘The reason why Kristan is number one and World Cup champion despite coming from a non-winter-sport nation is technology,’ stated Fleetcroft. ‘It’s an obsession with us, we will pursue everything we can and we’ve pushed harder than anyone else to make up for the gap in not having the ability to test. The benefit is that our sled is quick from first principles, whereas you will find some sliders that will be very fast on their home track, but go abroad to other venues and perhaps don’t perform as well.’

We live in an environment in the UK where we don’t want to take risks. As an athlete you have to take those risks and you have to push the boundaries. Engineers have to do the same.

Kristan Bromley

When it comes to technology, Bromley is just as confident in its ability to make up for track testing and attributes this to the UK’s strength in engineering. However, a lack of confidence to try new ideas is something that he believes could hold Britain back at a time when electronics and rapid manufacturing are changing the face of the industry.

‘I think we live in an environment in the UK where we don’t want to take risks. As an athlete you have to take those risks and you have to push the boundaries,’ said Bromley. ‘Engineers have to do the same. Something we’ve noticed with our American athlete friends are differences in confidence levels in people and their engineers. Americans seem to have bags of it — we don’t. We need to be out there innovating and pushing boundaries more than we have.’

Fleetcroft shares the view that skeleton could one day lead the way in technical innovation. ‘The traditional view of skeleton bobsleighing is guys with woolly hats going down slopes on tea trays. It’s nothing like that. It still makes me smile, because people say to me ‘Why are you doing that? You’ve been doing racing cars’ — but it’s a very similar environment. You have to build a close relationship with the racer and you’re using the same materials and the same tools. I think it could serve as an example to other high-performance industries.’