Ride Engineering Competition (Drop Tower Rollercoaster)

Journey through the ancient towers of a medieval castle while battling dragons, discovering hidden treasure, and becoming the knight of your own story. This attraction features a load area that swiftly travels upward in an elevator shaft where the passenger vehicle will embark across the draw bridge into the main tower where treasures lay. Upon entering the tower, a fierce dragon awaits. The passenger vehicle tilts downward to directly face the dragon where swift drops and lifts will help you evade the dragon's fire. Finally finding an opening, the passenger vehicle will drop past the mouth of the dragon into a race out of the bottom of the tower in a death defying rollercoaster.

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Joining up again with the Iowa State University Ride Engineering Competition, CAPED (Cal Poly Amusement Park Engineers and Designers) entered the in-person competition and won 3rd place out of 12 teams with recognition for the best documentation. The competition lasted 6 months.

The in-person competition entailed designing, modeling, and Building a 1:50 scale model amusement attraction that operated for 8 hours straight and followed ASTM F2291-20 standards.

I joined the Mechanical Design team as the Associate Track Ride Engineer. My task was to design, test, build, and implement a track for the rollercoaster aspect of the attraction while also collaborating with the drop tower engineer to design a specialty track that transitioned and aligned at both the top and bottom of the tower.

Detailed below is the documentation and images for the attraction.

The report consisted of 339 pages detailing the design process, testing, FEA, theming, standards adherence, and engineering drawings.