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1 Geometry
2 Meshes
1 Simulation setup
2 ResultsRunning-specific prostheses are engineered as sagittal-plane leaf springs: stiff enough to store and return energy efficiently when loaded front-to-back during a straight-line stride. This same stiffness works against the athlete on a curve. When any sprinter runs a bend, they lean their body toward the inside of the curve to counteract centripetal acceleration — a lean that a biological ankle and foot can accommodate through natural inversion, but that a rigid, medial-laterally stiff carbon blade cannot. As the athlete leans, the blade's sole is unable to tilt with them, so only its lateral (outer) edge contacts the track instead of the full sole. This partial contact has three measurable consequences, established in the biomechanics literature reviewed in Section 2: reduced ground contact area and grip, energy loss through increased friction and instability at the edge contact, and an uneven, less efficient force transfer path from the track into the athlete's leg. The net effect is a quantified performance penalty — approximately 3.9% slower stance-phase performance on the affected leg when it is on the inside of a curve, translating to roughly a 0.2 second penalty over a 200 m race for affected athletes (Taboga, Kram & Grabowski, 2016). At elite level, this is frequently the entire margin between medal positions. No current commercial product offers a reversible, low-cost, blade-agnostic correction for this specific deficit (Section 3). The problem this project addresses is therefore: how can the medial-lateral tilt lost to blade stiffness be restored during cornering, using an attachment that a) does not require the athlete to replace a blade they already own, trust, and have often had individually fitted, b) does not compromise the blade's straight-line spring performance, and c) remains compliant with World Athletics equipment regulations.
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tyankson created this project
4 days ago
1 Geometry 2 Meshes 1 Simulation setup 2 ResultsRunning-specific prostheses are engineered as sagittal-plane leaf springs: stiff enough to store and return energy efficiently when loaded front-to-back during a straight-line stride. This same stiffness works against the athlete on a curve. When any sprinter runs a bend, they lean their body toward the inside of the curve to counteract centripetal acceleration — a lean that a biological ankle and foot can accommodate through natural inversion, but that a rigid, medial-laterally stiff carbon blade cannot. As the athlete leans, the blade's sole is unable to tilt with them, so only its lateral (outer) edge contacts the track instead of the full sole. This partial contact has three measurable consequences, established in the biomechanics literature reviewed in Section 2: reduced ground contact area and grip, energy loss through increased friction and instability at the edge contact, and an uneven, less efficient force transfer path from the track into the athlete's leg. The net effect is a quantified performance penalty — approximately 3.9% slower stance-phase performance on the affected leg when it is on the inside of a curve, translating to roughly a 0.2 second penalty over a 200 m race for affected athletes (Taboga, Kram & Grabowski, 2016). At elite level, this is frequently the entire margin between medal positions. No current commercial product offers a reversible, low-cost, blade-agnostic correction for this specific deficit (Section 3). The problem this project addresses is therefore: how can the medial-lateral tilt lost to blade stiffness be restored during cornering, using an attachment that a) does not require the athlete to replace a blade they already own, trust, and have often had individually fitted, b) does not compromise the blade's straight-line spring performance, and c) remains compliant with World Athletics equipment regulations.
