Mid Sweden University

Cross-country skiing, biathlon and ski orienteering are competitive sports with practitioners who are mostly from countries in the northern hemisphere. The competition season is during the time when the ground is covered with snow, which roughly extends from mid-November to late March. During the rest time of the year, which is a long preparatory period of training for the skiers before the competition season, the skiers use roller skis for dryland training with the aim of imitating skiing on snow. Furthermore, over the last few decades, fairly specific indoor testing methods for cross-country skiers have become possible due to the development of treadmills that allow roller skiing using classical and freestyle techniques.

The expression 'acoustic optimization' can be applied to numerous different disciplines within the field of acoustics. From seismic waves, sound in the atmosphere through bioacoustic, psychoacoustics, and room and theater acoustics over shock and vibration in mechanical structures. This paper deals with the latter. Sound generated by vibrating structures is often called noise which is to be minimized. However, not all vibrating structures produce noise, for example the violin is also a vibrating structure that in most people's opinion produces sound called music. In the case of the violin, great effort is made not to minimize but to optimize the sound, i.e. to get the 'right' sound out of the structure. Acoustic optimization within this discipline involves automatic changes of structural design variables to obtain minimum or specified sound in specified regions inside or outside the structure. Examples of problem formulations and some theoretical considerations in the field of acoustic optimization in connection with vibrating mechanical structures will be pointed out. Four simple test cases are included as numerical examples of the method proposed.

A method for defining effective schedules for kiln drying of wood is presented. The method is designed in such a way that it proposes an optimized variation of temperature and humidity which yields the minimum total drying time, with the condition that the moisture content and the deformation not exceed specified limits after the drying and that the stress not exceeds a specified level at any time during the drying process in order to avoid crack development. To demonstrate the capability of the optimization method numerical results are presented. It should be noted that ill this first approach, drying starts from moisture content corresponding to the fibre-saturation point, i.e. approximate to 30%).

Modern optimization methods offer tools to create new, and to modify existing wood drying schedules. The total drying time can be minimized, at the sazne time as both the moisture content and the deformation after completed drying are within acceptable limits. The stress levels during drying are also considered.

This paper shows how very tradition-bound construction can be improved through the use of modern technology. In this case, a cross-country ski, the construction can be traced back to a ski found in a swamp in Vasterbotten in northern Sweden, a ski approximately 5000 years old. (4 refs.)