Lynah Rink: The Science of the Ice

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Lund, Stephen; Mathew, Esha; Pratt, Kristamarie; Zacherman, Jonathan

Abstract

Ice hockey is probably the most popular sports team at Cornell, easily selling out tickets to every game at the start of every year. Although eager fans study the team, plays, opponents, and results, it is doubtful that they pay any attention to the science behind the very ice the game depends upon. Our project seeks to look into the ice at Lynah rink, specifically the heat transfer processes involved in making the ice, maintaining it, and removing it in the off-season. We investigated how much time it would take to prepare the surface for ice hockey, how much time it would take to resurface the ice during a game, and lastly how much time it would take to melt all the ice and remove it during the off-season. We used a one-dimensional geometry with sixteen sections to model the eight layers of ice needed for the rink. Two sections represented one layer, equal to 0.3175 cm. Layers and boundaries were turned on and off depending on the part of the problem that was being solved for. Our initial results showed that it takes about four hours to place eight layers, equivalent to 2.54 cm of ice down on the rink. Conversely, it takes about five minutes for the 2.54 cm of ice to melt with the concrete slab heated. The resurfacing process, needed to be complete in less than fifteen minutes, was found by our model to take about six minutes. This value is subject to change from variation in the heat transfer coefficient and rink temperature, but our analysis found that even high values for these parameters still allowed resurfacing in a maximum of eight minutes. Melting was the least complex situation to model, and we found that it took about five minutes to melt the ice with the concrete heated to 60?C(333.15K).