Applications 3D

The Work

The fastest sport on ice just became faster! When The US national Olympic team was looking for an edge to improve their luge sleds, they contacted DOW, an international manufacturer of materials. The DOW company researches new materials and develops customized revolutionary materials, designed for a specific purpose. The Luge was using newly developed custom material. Also, the shape of the luge played a big part in the functionality. So, a special clay modeler was hired to articulate an existing idea into the physical shape of the new luge blade. Once the clay model of the new blade was approved, Applications 3D was contracted by DOW to provide 3D scanning and reverse engineering services. Applications 3D used the latest Steinbichler Comet 5 white light 3d scanning technology to accurately measure millions of points on the full shape of the Olympic luge blade. Because of the scanner, we were able to capture the complete shape in a digital format. Once the scanning was completed, the millions of points were optimized into a single skin mesh of triangles, called an STL (Stereo Lithography) model. This model was then reverse-engineered into an engineering-grade surface model, by surfacing over all the intricate freeform shapes.