It's enough to break the heart of anyone who has a special appreciation of the beauty of sport: An ice-hockey player drives the shot with all his might–but instead of landing cleanly in the high corner, the puck skips a little way and the end of the stick with the blade hangs despondently from the remains of the ice athlete's working tool. A break of the stick thwarts the entire effort. This scene is not such a rare occurrence. At the time when ice hockey was played with wooden sticks, around 100 sticks per season and player ended up in this way and even nowadays, with sticks of composite fibres, this figure can still sometimes be as high as 50.

The improvement in the new generation of sticks is down to Composites Busch, a company in Porrentruy in Canton Jura (1). Then this company was the first, in 1992, to market a composite carbon fibre stick. The great advantage of the new stick is that it is fabricated in one piece and relatively light. The Busch stick soon convinced players of its quality in the meantime other big companies have followed, particularly in the USA, and have launched their own comparable products. This means that Busch is again forced to innovate. Because as a small company, it simply has to deliver better quality products in order to survive. Given the situation the people in charge at Busch got in touch with ETH, in order to develop, in collaboration, new sticks based on scientific knowledge.

Strongly stressed sticks

The project "New Generation Icehockey Stick“ has been running since last autumn (2)at the ETH Institute for Mechanical Systems under the guidance of Professor Paolo Ermanni. First results are now at hand. "Thanks to high-speed high-resolution film takes we can now investigate in detail how a stick bends during a slapshot,“ explains head of project Michael Sauter from the ETH Centre of Structure Technologies.

ETH researchers record a shot from the Swiss National player Julien Vauclair. large

Details, never seen before, thanks to high-speed, high-resolution film takes: the ice-hockey stick bends about 16 degrees during a slapshot. (Picture: Michael Sauter) large

Even though it was known that with this sort of shot with the greatest stress the stick is hit on the ice with great force, so that it is stressed like an archery bow, the scientists were still surprised at the degree of bending. The stick bent about 16 degrees. But they also recorded the stretching using a strain gauge to calculate the commensurate forces. Sauter describes the bending: "With a hard shot bending or else compression of the carbon fibres occurs of around one per cent. This means that sometimes more than half of the body weight can be transferred on to the stick.

Professional players as trial subjects

In order to eliminate in advance any reproach that the measured shots do not reflect reality the researchers included professional hockey players in the tests. Among others, players from the Swiss National Team Sandy Jeannin and Julien Vauclair from HC Lugano thundered the puck into the net. Data was also collected over the past season in the Resega Hall from HC Lugano as well as from HC Ajoie. "The collaboration with the hockey aces was enriching for both sides," says Sauter. Every player had his own individual demands on the stick and the filmed sequences show that each player's shot technique is different. It might be possible that the film could help these cracks to work more systematically on their shooting posture.

But what is the next scientific step? Now that the real situation is recorded numerically it is possible to simulate the stress on a machine. In an iterative process new sticks are now being modelled, tested and improved again. The goal is to produce a light, stick as durable as possible and with good damping behaviour by next year. If the search for the perfect ice-hockey stick proves fruitful there is a good chance that at least sticks from Switzerland will be Olympic champions in 2006 in Turin.