Nima@leminal.space
on 29 Jul 2024 05:57
nextcollapse
Fuck Wired and their shitty paywall. Here for anyone interested:
Pole vaulting is one of the more outlandish Olympic events. The primary instruments of the sport are curious creations—big sticks, between 10 and 17 feet in length, that certain track & field Olympians hold while sprinting, then jab into the ground and hang on to as they hurl themselves through the air to achieve increasingly greater heights.
If that sounds dangerous, well, that’s because it is. There have been dozens of injuries in pole vaulting, even at the Olympic level. Most of them occur when a vaulter hits the landing pad wrong, or misses it entirely. But there are also often problems with the pole. After all, flinging a human body up to 20 feet in the air takes a lot of kinetic energy, and puts a lot of pressure on the pole.
If something goes wrong—even a small, invisible fracture in the pole—that instrument can snap into pieces and send the unfortunate vaulter tumbling to the ground. Pole breaks have had disastrous consequences, causing athletes to suffer injuries as severe as brain hemorrhaging.
Clearly that’s not ideal. But someday, it might be possible to head off some of those failings by making poles that can fix themselves before they break.
Vaulting poles have a storied history that have led to the creation of the sport. Ever since human beings figured out how to break large sticks off of trees, they have been using them to launch themselves over and around things. At first, vaulting poles were used to close distances, like hopping over gaps or getting across particularly soupy patches of marshland.
The ancient Greeks used them in their athletic competitions, though the goal was to cover the most distance across the ground. The idea of turning vaulting into a sport where people aimed to achieve the most height was started by a cricket club in Ulverston, England, in 1843. Pole vaulting first came to the Olympics in 1896, and has been propelled back into the limelight every four years since.
Old Poles
The earliest poles were made from wood, like ash or bamboo. As you might imagine, they broke often. But poles have matured, advancing through the years to incorporate stronger materials such as aluminum and steel. In the 1960s, reinforced fiberglass became the go-to lightweight material.
Modern poles are typically formed with layers of fiberglass and carbon-fiber composites. Curiously, there are currently no regulations that mandate what materials are used to make the poles themselves. Yes, they break far less often than the bamboo shoots of old, but still aren’t perfect.
Vaulting poles, as you probably know, bend quite a lot when projecting a person up into the air. (UST Essx, a company that makes vault poles, tests its products by bending them down to 65 percent of their standing height—forming a near C shape.) That means poles have to be made with the right combination of materials to be both sufficiently bendable and sturdy to keep from splitting apart. They’ve got to be strong enough to hold a person’s weight, and light enough to be held while running.
Properly taken care of, modern poles can last for years or even decades. But over time, or after being mishandled or stepped on, little cracks and divots can occur. Sometimes, they’re so small they can’t even be seen, but still compromise the pole’s structural integrity all the same.
Pole vault breaks come without warning—and can be catastrophic.
“Cracking and voids are the enemy of the composite,” says Don Rahrig, VP of engineering and product development at Essx. He says these sometimes-invisible imperfections can spell doom for the pole. “What will happen is your cracks will propagate—a little bit like cracking in your windshield. And then when it fails, it’s catastrophic.”
Even in the advanced age of complex fiber composites, poles aren’t invincible. They can break for a few reasons. It can happen if a vaulter uses a pole that can’t handle their weight, or if a crack or defect leads to structural failure. Trouble is, when there’s a problem, poles tend to break in an instant. They can snap and shatter under the pressure of a jump—sometimes with injurious consequences for the recently airborne vaulter.
As for the pole itself, there isn’t much you can do with the bits after a catastrophic break, as the structural fibers cannot be completely sewn back together once split. Little of the pole can be salvaged or recycled afterwards. The rest of it goes in the trash.
New Thinking
There are a few potential ways to try to stave off these problems. A paper published by Georgia Gwinnett College suggests the idea of adding an gloss across the surface that can release dyed microcapsules when cracked, making splits more visible when they occur. If athletes could spot those cracks early, they could avoid an equipment failure before it
DaTingGoBrrr@lemmy.ml
on 29 Jul 2024 06:17
nextcollapse
Thank you for posting it here. It’s an interesting read! Especially the part about pole vaulting history
you’re welcome. i hate paywalls and I thought it was an interesting read.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 07:24
nextcollapse
I’m surprised they aren’t single-use with that tight balance of conflicting properties, especially on Olympics. And, ehm, with all safety precautions it looks a little like greenwashing these poles after talking oneself into the corner what no producer of equipment would ever do, honest.
With how interesting this sport looks, may there be an option to retire fiberglass for something not bending on the world level? It wouldn’t allow these funny trebuchet yanks and is more boring to watch but the level of mastery of pulling oneself with a sturdy pole seems not far off.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
on 29 Jul 2024 08:17
collapse
Posting the plain text of the article should be the default option, a number of subreddits outright banned pay walled articles, and it’s one of the few subreddit rules I actually liked.
Thanks for the story.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 09:14
collapse
Blowing past the suggestion to highlight the cracks in hopes of a magic compound that makes them last forever seems naive as hell.
Seeing the poles failing sounds extremely valuable.
Deebster@programming.dev
on 29 Jul 2024 11:10
nextcollapse
I don’t know that I agree - it’s worth researching these things because if it works that’s great and that paper proves that other people are working on the visibility problem.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 11:31
collapse
Research is great.
But the article is dismissing a very practical solution and implying it’s nonsense to pump up a pie in the sky longshot.
Deebster@programming.dev
on 29 Jul 2024 11:47
collapse
[Making cracks visible is] helpful, but what would be ideal is a way to not just find the cracks, but to fix them.
That’s what the article says, they’re hardly implying it’s nonsense. Or are you saying that the self-healing is nonsense? There are examples of self-healing materials, like Roman concrete.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 12:07
collapse
That’s extremely dismissive, of something that appears to resolve the issue entirely.
Self healing materials with similar properties and requirements to pole vaulting poles don’t exist. They might eventually, but we’re not close. When the weight and flex requirements are that strict, and failure is that catastrophic, expecting a solution in the next 20 years is extremely optimistic, and that’s ignoring costs entirely. The article should be discussing the actual real world solution far more.
Deebster@programming.dev
on 29 Jul 2024 12:17
collapse
It’s far from my field, so I’ll have to take your word on that!
I’m sorry but poles shattering sending shrapnel all over the place is not valuable, it’s dangerous.
If they could be replaced with a material that’s similarly springy but doesn’t shatter but degrades in a safe manner as faults accumulate that’d be a definitive improvement.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 13:20
collapse
Identifying damaged poles keep poles from shattering by taking them out of circulation.
If they could keep poles from being capable of shattering, obviously that would be good. But they haven’t done that or showed any particular indication that they have a realistic path to doing that. “We can do it on a flat surface and think it’s almost as good as new” is worth exploring, but it’s best case a very long way off and may never be possible in real world use cases at real world scale and pricing at all.
The highlighting micro-fractures is absolutely achievable in the near future, could absolutely be a new safety requirement in a reasonable time frame, and could very easily be understood and checked by both coaches and players prior to every jump.
Only thing worse than a sense of safety is a false sense of safety.
conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works
on 29 Jul 2024 14:03
collapse
Researching it is great. I said that.
But pumping up a solution decades in the future while dismissing a solution that’s practical now doesn’t make sense, and (per this coverage) isn’t intended to resolve any of the other points of failure. It (might) mitigate some of the fracturing if given enough time in between to cure. It won’t address manufacturing failures, it won’t address any out of spec use, it won’t address the fact that materials age over time (the reason that nearly all protective equipment has a finite lifespan before you should throw it away and replace it no matter how hard it was used). Giving a false sense of safety to a longer lifespan when it shouldn’t have one regardless is potentially as harmful as giving people confidence that poles that aren’t fractured aren’t fractured.
threaded - newest
Fuck Wired and their shitty paywall. Here for anyone interested:
Pole vaulting is one of the more outlandish Olympic events. The primary instruments of the sport are curious creations—big sticks, between 10 and 17 feet in length, that certain track & field Olympians hold while sprinting, then jab into the ground and hang on to as they hurl themselves through the air to achieve increasingly greater heights.
If that sounds dangerous, well, that’s because it is. There have been dozens of injuries in pole vaulting, even at the Olympic level. Most of them occur when a vaulter hits the landing pad wrong, or misses it entirely. But there are also often problems with the pole. After all, flinging a human body up to 20 feet in the air takes a lot of kinetic energy, and puts a lot of pressure on the pole.
If something goes wrong—even a small, invisible fracture in the pole—that instrument can snap into pieces and send the unfortunate vaulter tumbling to the ground. Pole breaks have had disastrous consequences, causing athletes to suffer injuries as severe as brain hemorrhaging.
Clearly that’s not ideal. But someday, it might be possible to head off some of those failings by making poles that can fix themselves before they break.
Vaulting poles have a storied history that have led to the creation of the sport. Ever since human beings figured out how to break large sticks off of trees, they have been using them to launch themselves over and around things. At first, vaulting poles were used to close distances, like hopping over gaps or getting across particularly soupy patches of marshland.
The ancient Greeks used them in their athletic competitions, though the goal was to cover the most distance across the ground. The idea of turning vaulting into a sport where people aimed to achieve the most height was started by a cricket club in Ulverston, England, in 1843. Pole vaulting first came to the Olympics in 1896, and has been propelled back into the limelight every four years since. Old Poles
The earliest poles were made from wood, like ash or bamboo. As you might imagine, they broke often. But poles have matured, advancing through the years to incorporate stronger materials such as aluminum and steel. In the 1960s, reinforced fiberglass became the go-to lightweight material.
Modern poles are typically formed with layers of fiberglass and carbon-fiber composites. Curiously, there are currently no regulations that mandate what materials are used to make the poles themselves. Yes, they break far less often than the bamboo shoots of old, but still aren’t perfect.
Vaulting poles, as you probably know, bend quite a lot when projecting a person up into the air. (UST Essx, a company that makes vault poles, tests its products by bending them down to 65 percent of their standing height—forming a near C shape.) That means poles have to be made with the right combination of materials to be both sufficiently bendable and sturdy to keep from splitting apart. They’ve got to be strong enough to hold a person’s weight, and light enough to be held while running.
Properly taken care of, modern poles can last for years or even decades. But over time, or after being mishandled or stepped on, little cracks and divots can occur. Sometimes, they’re so small they can’t even be seen, but still compromise the pole’s structural integrity all the same.
Pole vault breaks come without warning—and can be catastrophic.
“Cracking and voids are the enemy of the composite,” says Don Rahrig, VP of engineering and product development at Essx. He says these sometimes-invisible imperfections can spell doom for the pole. “What will happen is your cracks will propagate—a little bit like cracking in your windshield. And then when it fails, it’s catastrophic.”
Even in the advanced age of complex fiber composites, poles aren’t invincible. They can break for a few reasons. It can happen if a vaulter uses a pole that can’t handle their weight, or if a crack or defect leads to structural failure. Trouble is, when there’s a problem, poles tend to break in an instant. They can snap and shatter under the pressure of a jump—sometimes with injurious consequences for the recently airborne vaulter.
As for the pole itself, there isn’t much you can do with the bits after a catastrophic break, as the structural fibers cannot be completely sewn back together once split. Little of the pole can be salvaged or recycled afterwards. The rest of it goes in the trash. New Thinking
There are a few potential ways to try to stave off these problems. A paper published by Georgia Gwinnett College suggests the idea of adding an gloss across the surface that can release dyed microcapsules when cracked, making splits more visible when they occur. If athletes could spot those cracks early, they could avoid an equipment failure before it
Thank you for posting it here. It’s an interesting read! Especially the part about pole vaulting history
you’re welcome. i hate paywalls and I thought it was an interesting read.
I’m surprised they aren’t single-use with that tight balance of conflicting properties, especially on Olympics. And, ehm, with all safety precautions it looks a little like greenwashing these poles after talking oneself into the corner what no producer of equipment would ever do, honest.
With how interesting this sport looks, may there be an option to retire fiberglass for something not bending on the world level? It wouldn’t allow these funny trebuchet yanks and is more boring to watch but the level of mastery of pulling oneself with a sturdy pole seems not far off.
Posting the plain text of the article should be the default option, a number of subreddits outright banned pay walled articles, and it’s one of the few subreddit rules I actually liked.
Thanks for the story.
Blowing past the suggestion to highlight the cracks in hopes of a magic compound that makes them last forever seems naive as hell.
Seeing the poles failing sounds extremely valuable.
I don’t know that I agree - it’s worth researching these things because if it works that’s great and that paper proves that other people are working on the visibility problem.
Research is great.
But the article is dismissing a very practical solution and implying it’s nonsense to pump up a pie in the sky longshot.
That’s what the article says, they’re hardly implying it’s nonsense. Or are you saying that the self-healing is nonsense? There are examples of self-healing materials, like Roman concrete.
That’s extremely dismissive, of something that appears to resolve the issue entirely.
Self healing materials with similar properties and requirements to pole vaulting poles don’t exist. They might eventually, but we’re not close. When the weight and flex requirements are that strict, and failure is that catastrophic, expecting a solution in the next 20 years is extremely optimistic, and that’s ignoring costs entirely. The article should be discussing the actual real world solution far more.
It’s far from my field, so I’ll have to take your word on that!
I’m sorry but poles shattering sending shrapnel all over the place is not valuable, it’s dangerous.
If they could be replaced with a material that’s similarly springy but doesn’t shatter but degrades in a safe manner as faults accumulate that’d be a definitive improvement.
Identifying damaged poles keep poles from shattering by taking them out of circulation.
If they could keep poles from being capable of shattering, obviously that would be good. But they haven’t done that or showed any particular indication that they have a realistic path to doing that. “We can do it on a flat surface and think it’s almost as good as new” is worth exploring, but it’s best case a very long way off and may never be possible in real world use cases at real world scale and pricing at all.
The highlighting micro-fractures is absolutely achievable in the near future, could absolutely be a new safety requirement in a reasonable time frame, and could very easily be understood and checked by both coaches and players prior to every jump.
Por que no los dos?
Only thing worse than a sense of safety is a false sense of safety.
Researching it is great. I said that.
But pumping up a solution decades in the future while dismissing a solution that’s practical now doesn’t make sense, and (per this coverage) isn’t intended to resolve any of the other points of failure. It (might) mitigate some of the fracturing if given enough time in between to cure. It won’t address manufacturing failures, it won’t address any out of spec use, it won’t address the fact that materials age over time (the reason that nearly all protective equipment has a finite lifespan before you should throw it away and replace it no matter how hard it was used). Giving a false sense of safety to a longer lifespan when it shouldn’t have one regardless is potentially as harmful as giving people confidence that poles that aren’t fractured aren’t fractured.