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How Dow Chemical Is Prepping Team USA For Luge In PyeongChang

The two sports might only seem loosely connected: race cars thundering around an asphalt track and sleds speeding down the winding arm of an ice track. But at The Dow Chemical Company, engineers are borrowing from techniques they’ve longed used for NASCAR to make the USA Luge Team quicker at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics.

A partner of the Olympic Games and of Team USA, Dow engineers and scientists are helping the USA Luge Team tune its sleds to get an edge over the competition. Using a web of sensors, GPS data, physics models and lab testing, Dow is helping to improve the team’s speed and agility, while helping racers understand the South Korean race conditions so they can make last-minute adjustments to their sleds.

While the company wouldn’t provide specifics, hesitant to give away Team USA’s secret sauce ahead of the 2018 Games, Sam Crabtree, lead R&D manager at Dow who works with both Richard Childress Racing and USA Luge, said Dow has focused on improving the components of the sled’s materials. 

“When you combine advanced materials, manufacturing and in-lab and on-track testing, you have the ability to develop ‘vehicles’ that are faster, more tuned, and precise, whether they have four wheels or no wheels,” Crabtree said at a panel sponsored by Texas Motor Speedway at the University of North Texas ahead of Nov. 5’s AAA Texas 500 NASCAR Cup.

Also a sponsor of RCR, scientists in Dow’s Materials Engineering Center have worked hand-in-hand with engineers from both RCR and USA Luge for several years on an ongoing basis, using similar formulas and scientific methods to solve problems for both teams.

Together, they have worked to understand and improve aerodynamics and identify how each sport’s extreme environment (heat for NASCAR and freezing temperatures for luge) impact the material and component performance of their respective vehicles. Their goal for each is the same: to make their vehicles more efficient and get athletes to the finish line faster.

“They have contributed tremendously toward our success, by transforming our entire sled R&D, design and manufacturing process,” Gordy Sheer, U.S. Olympics silver medalist for luge and Director of Marketing and Sponsorship of USA Luge, said on the panel.

Austin Dillon, driver of the No. 3 Dow Chevrolet, said Dow has helped unleash a new kind of “custom engineering” that’s focused on highly technical components of the car. Currently, the Dow and RCR engineering teams are collaborating on projects focused on materials performance, tweaking the technological makeup of everything from lubricants and foam insulators to oil additives, sealants and carbon fiber composites. The same line of thinking has also been applied to luge. 

“We do testing to understand the performance of those materials with the understanding that we’re looking to drive performance,” Crabtree said in an interview with SportTechie. “These are materials that are required for specific attributes of race conditions so the athlete can worry less about controlling the vehicle and more about the agility of the sport and speed.”

For the luge team, which deals with race day temperatures on the ice that can dip as low as -30 degrees Fahrenheit, Dow has worked on compensating for the fact that frigid temperatures make materials more rigid by tweaking the inherent properties of the sled’s bridge, which includes the slider and pod in the center where the rider sits and the steel support structure that holds it all together.

That helps ensure the team can maintain better control of the vehicle during races, similar to the way Dow’s worked in helping keep temperatures cool under the hood of NASCAR cars, where they can exceed 400 degrees, has helped drivers better control their vehicles.

The company also studies the forces that are applied to these components during races to understand the stress and strain on them so they don’t suffer premature failure. The sled is instrumented with an accelerometer and strain gauges, which helps Dow engineers understand how the forces are applied in race conditions where the sled can experience 5 g-forces as it comes down the slope.

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“The way that bridge deforms in race conditions is critical, so you have to understand that,” Crabtree said. “We took data from a race…then reverse engineered that back to the bridges to help us manage the suspension of the sled.”

In luge, where being on the podium or not can mean tenths of a second, Dow sees its role as chipping away at the incremental steps that aid and advance performance. Added together, the minor tweaks its makes through the data it collects and the tests it conducts make a difference over time.

Dow also relies on local indicators that evaluate the luge tracks and environments. Since luge teams don’t tend to get much practice on the tracks they travel to for the Olympics, they have to acclimate quickly to new courses.

Dow will use mapping and GPS data, which it pulls into a physics model that can calculate expected speed and drag forces on the sled at 10-meter increments as it travels down the hill, to help the USA Luge team understand with precision the kinds of conditions it’ll face.

Dow might not be able to make race-day tweaks from the U.S. as the team gets ready to compete in PyeongChang, but according to the company, providing riders with tools to understand the dynamics of what will happen to the sled at each turn enables them to make last-minute adjustments as they vie for a spot on the podium. 

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