Abstract
The friction felt by a speed skater is calculated as function of the velocity and tilt angle of the skate. This calculation is an extension of the more common theory of friction of upright skates. Not only in rounding a curve the skate has to be tilted, but also in straightforward skating small tilt angles occur. The tilt increases the friction substanstially and even for small tilts the increase is relevant. The increase of the friction with the velocity, which is very slow for the upright skate, becomes more pronounced for large tilts.
Highlights
Skating is an intriguing sport from the physics viewpoint, as ice seems to be the only substance that allows skating in a remarkable range of temperatures, velocities and skater weights
In these integrals the contact length enters as a trial parameter which has to be adjusted later such that the normal force matches the weight of the skater
Using that skates trace a furrow in the ice by a plastic deformation, we have derived a set of equations from which the forces on the skate can be calculated by integration of the layer equations for the basis and the side of the skate
Summary
Skating is an intriguing sport from the physics viewpoint, as ice seems to be the only substance that allows skating in a remarkable range of temperatures, velocities and skater weights. The rheology described by Eq (1) will lead to a friction increasing with the value of γ Another consequence of the plastic deformation of ice in skating is that the boundary conditions for the pressure in the water layer differ from those used in [6,7,9] where the pressure is set to zero at the boundary of the water layer. (Short trackers experience even larger tilt angles in the curve of the track, which has a shorter radius of curvature.) The body needs for stability a tilt angle parallel to the resultant of the gravitational force M g and the centrifugal force M V 2/Rc, where M is the mass of the skater, V the velocity and Rc the radius of the curve These forces act on the center of mass of the skater and must be compensated by an equal and opposite force from the ice exerting on the skate. The paper closes with a presentation of the results and a discussion of the main features of the solution
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