Image source @ Visual China
Text | Hua Shang Tao Strategy, author 丨 Wu Rui
Beijing Fengtai Changxindian, there is a strong industrial style of the building complex, this is a place called "Erqi Factory".
In China, such institutions, named after numerical codes, often come from an extraordinary background. There is both the Beijing Banknote Printing Factory, code-named "542 Factory", and the nuclear industry base in Yumen, Gansu Province, known as "404 City". Erqi Factory, which gave birth to China's first "construction-type" steam locomotive and the first internal combustion locomotive, is the birthplace of heavy equipment in a big country.
In 2018, Erqi Factory bid farewell to its manufacturing mission. Two years later, a team moved into the southwest corner of the plant. In this glorious land, this team needs to think about a new question: whether Chinese speed skaters can wear world-class competition costumes.
01 Puzzles on and off the field
Liu Li is the head of this team. Before 2019, she had only one identity: professor at Beijing Institute of Fashion.
At the beginning of 2019, Liu Li received a call for help from the Winter Games Center. She wants to customize six sets of competition costumes for China's top synchronized pair skaters Sui Wenjing and Han Cong, with a time limit of three weeks.
Liu Li won very beautifully. Among the four major standards of "fast, protective, warm and beautiful", beauty is the most important indicator of figure skating suits. With an understanding of Chinese aesthetics, her design was soon released.
Three weeks later, at the Saitama World Championships in Japan, Sui Wenjing and Han Cong, dressed in Chinese suits, broke the records of free skating and total double results in one fell swoop and won the championship.
It's an incentive, but it's also the beginning of a new challenge.
On July 31, 2015, at the plenary session of the 128th International Winter Olympics, Beijing won the right to host the 2022 Winter Olympics with 44 votes. This means that once the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics are over, Beijing's sprint time will begin.
Sprinting is not only the preparation of athletes, but also the emergency escort of sports technology. The race suit for the short track speed skating event is the most urgent one.
For short-track speed skating, which will determine the medal in 0.01 seconds, the race suit is the most technological equipment.
Sliding on ice at high speeds requires resistance against air resistance equivalent to a level 10 wind. An excellent set of professional speed skating suits, its surface and structure, need to be as much as possible to reduce resistance. It also has to be tough and able to withstand the cutting of ice blades in a collision. It needs to be truly "tailor-made" and conform to the technical habits of top athletes.
A small piece of clothing actually integrates mathematics, computer graphics, mechanics of materials, ergonomics, and human kinematics. In the past few years, this has been a technical field exclusive to Western countries, and the competition uniforms of Chinese players can only be customized overseas.
But the test results were disappointing – the overseas custom clothing did not meet the promised level of technology, and the best equipment that Chinese athletes could get was actually the level of a decade ago.
How to make Chinese athletes wear world-class equipment is a realistic demand. Not to lose first in the field of science and technology, this is the expectation of the industry. In 2019, as part of the key research and development plan of the "Winter Olympics of Science and Technology", the project of "Key Technologies for the Research and Development of High-performance Clothing for Winter Sports and Training Competitions" came into being.
Beijing Institute of Fashion is the lead unit of the project, so Liu Li has added an identity: director of the National Winter Sports Clothing Equipment Research and Development Center. However, there are still gaps in technology, high complexity of disciplines, tight time, and great pressure, which is a race against time. At that time, Liu Li did not know whether she could win.
In the sprint time of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Liu Li was not alone in the pressure. In Shandong, more technical experts need to face the manufacturing problem of domestic snow wax vehicles together.
Snow wax car, an essential equipment for snow sports at the Winter Olympics.
Waxing is essential for snowboard maintenance, especially to speed up the ski's gliding on the snow. The countries with the advantages of ice and snow sports are basically equipped with special snow wax vehicles with the team.
Wang Yan is the deputy leader of the National Cross-Country Skiing Training Team. In his recollection, the snow wax car is a presence that makes Chinese athletes envious. "In the past, when we went to play abroad, we could only wax in the open space on the side of the field, like a barbecue."
In November 2020, as part of the "Winter Olympics of Science and Technology", the State General Administration of Sport delivered the snow wax car development project to Shandong Province. However, within one year, to complete the process of design, research and development, to manufacturing and debugging of special functional vehicles, the time is urgent and the technical difficulty is extremely high.
If the speed skating suit is a race to reduce obstacles, and the snow wax car is created from zero to one, then the artificial snow team is facing a real breakthrough in the pass.
A little-known knowledge is that snow used in large international ice and snow competitions is not natural.
Dedicated icy snow that needs to be artificially manufactured. This icy snow has strict production standards in terms of hardness, density and moisture content. Its density must reach 0.65 grams per cubic centimeter, and the density of ordinary snow is only 0.1 to 0.4 grams per cubic centimeter.
Only by using such snow can the safety of athletes be guaranteed and conducive to the improvement of performance. As the infrastructure of the Winter Olympics, snow protection is extremely critical.
Due to the quality of the pistes, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics will have 5 postponements and 9 postponements. Although the subsequent Winter Olympics in Sochi and Pingchang were stored in advance, the game was postponed and rescheduled several times due to unexpected factors such as temperature and high winds.
The manufacturing, preservation and storage technology of high-grade icy snow is not within reach.
As the head of the snow technology project for the Beijing Winter Olympics, Wang Feiteng has an unforgettable memory: foreign experts stepped on the snow field, pinched it, and then gave a conclusion that they were not qualified. As for the core technology of snowmaking, experts have never been silent.
On the one hand, foreign companies have excellent technology but arrogant attitudes; on the other hand, Beijing is located in a continental monsoon climate zone, with extremely large temperature differences and changeable weather, and once there is rain and snowfall, it must be immediately re-laid. The results are clear: snowmaking technology is a hurdle that must be overcome in order to reserve sufficient icy snow before the Start of the Winter Olympics.
Whether it's a drag-down race or a breakthrough in the pass, it's hard for Chinese technicians to survive this sprint until they find a clear answer.
02 Comprehensive breakout
Since 2019, by taking three-dimensional measurements for more than 400 athletes, tracking athlete movements, and refining the study of athletes' skin stretching rules, Liu Li and her team have initially completed the structural design of competition costumes, and only design manuscripts have exceeded 2,000 copies.
But theoretical design obviously needs to be tested in actual combat. At the same moment, a cross-border team is completing the final equipment debugging in Fengtai Erqi Factory.
China Aviation Industry Aerodynamic Research Institute (hereinafter referred to as "Pneumatic Institute"), known in the industry as "626 Institute". It is China's first high-speed aerodynamic professional research institute, from the J-7 to the "Flying Leopard", the wind tunnel manufactured by 626, almost participated in the development of almost all key military aircraft.
A wind tunnel, a type of pipe that produces artificial airflow, is often used to study the aerodynamic effects of air flowing through objects.
In the past few years, the pneumatic institute has been experimenting with cross-border applications of wind tunnels in other fields. Through the study of foreign sports, it was found that the use of wind tunnels to improve competition performance has excellent results.
This led to a cross-border cooperation, entrusted by the General Administration of Sports, the pneumatic institute built two large, two small and four sports wind tunnels, located in the Erqi Factory comprehensive wind tunnel, which is one of them.
Using the method of wind tunnel experiment, the drag reduction performance of sports equipment under various resistances is tested. The wind tunnel has thus become a weapon for Liu Li and the clothing team to improve the design of equipment. After the completion of the wind tunnel, The Erqi Factory became the permanent site of the garment team, and the 860-hour test helped the team screen out 56 kinds of clothing structures and dozens of anti-drag fabrics for the speed skating project.
Standing behind the costume team is not only the pneumatic institute. During the more than two years of research, many universities and enterprises participated in it. Tsinghua University and Wuhan Institute of Physical Education are responsible for the design of the drag reduction mechanism, Donghua University is responsible for the design of the resistance reduction fabric, Guangdong Derun Textile Co., Ltd. is responsible for weaving fabrics, ANTA is responsible for the overall clothing production, and Beijing Fashion Institute is responsible for the overall lead in addition to performing wind tunnel tests and effect feedback.
It is in this kind of industrial chain collaboration that the problems spanning textile engineering, clothing design, tribology, thermophysics, biomechanics and sports science are solved one by one.
Six hundred kilometers away in Shandong, a larger industrial cooperation has begun around the snow wax car.
On November 6, 2020, Shandong Province established the Snow Wax Vehicle Joint Research Project Headquarters. In the list of members, including the province's top equipment manufacturing capabilities and technical resources: China National Heavy Duty Truck, Weichai Power, Haier Group, Hisense Group, Linuo Ruite Group, Shandong Industrial Design Institute...
Although it is enough to represent "Shandong Intelligent Manufacturing" in terms of strength, in order to solve the practical difficulties, it is also necessary to fight the technical hard battle one by one.
As a working vehicle in a very low temperature environment, a typical problem is that the heating air conditioner in the snow wax car must be started quickly.
Haier, a leading enterprise in the manufacture of smart home appliances in China. In the snow wax vehicle project, it undertakes the three technical tasks of motorhome interaction, fresh air system and air conditioning equipment, providing one-stop healthy air solutions for snow wax vehicles.
In the first time, Haier sent the Group's Kaos Industrial Internet Platform, led the integration of internal resources, and jointly established a snow wax car attack team with Kangpaisi, Gute and other ecological parties, relying on the rich ecological resources of the platform, coordinating more than 200 people to join the technical research work of the snow wax car.
Through communication with the national team coaching staff, athletes, waxers, the team learned about the use, installation, function and other on-site needs. The full interaction with China National Heavy Duty Truck and the Provincial Design Institute, combined with Haier's data, simulation and customization capabilities that have been precipitated for many years, the overall layout and functional partitioning of the snow wax car were quickly deduced. It is followed by 6 invention patents such as machine low temperature heating start- and air conditioning low-temperature heating start-up anti-low-voltage fault technology.
In an outdoor snowstorm environment of minus 30 degrees, how does the monitor of the snow wax car work smoothly? This is the task that Hisense got.
In the Task Ofsense Video, the low-temperature glass panel has become an optional solution for the display; through the special protection of the product structure and motherboard circuit to withstand heavy wind and snow interference; in addition, the application of ULED backlight partition control technology, the snow wax car display has successfully passed the high brightness and high contrast environmental test.
Liu Xiping is the deputy director of the special vehicle design department of China National Heavy Duty Truck Application Engineering Development Center. As the designer of the overall plan of the snow wax car, Liu Xiping made a statistic afterwards - the design data of the snow wax car saved on the computer was as many as several hundred GB, and the design drawings of the towing head of the snow wax car alone were drawn more than 600 pieces.
While the snow wax car project is racing against time, Wang Feiteng's artificial snow team is undergoing the most arduous test in the wild.
From 2019 to 2021, Wang Feiteng's team, which is responsible for the research and development of icy snow, needs to stick to Heilongjiang Yabuli Ski Resort, Zhangjiakou Genting Ski Park, National Alpine Ski Center and other venues to conduct snowmaking tests almost every winter.
For team members, another implication of the experiment was to work outdoors for ten hours a day at more than -30 degrees Celsius. However, rather than cracked skin and cold, the team members are more concerned about the density, hardness and moisture content of the snow.
Behind the artificial snow team is the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. After hundreds of experiments, the artificial snow team finally developed the most suitable ice-like snow production scheme for the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, and mastered all the techniques from snow making, snow preservation to snow storage.
"I don't know if the snow is deep, but I feel helpless." This is the sigh of Su Dongpo, but with the help of science and technology, in the face of ice and snow, ignorance and helplessness have become the past tense, and more solutions and achievements have begun to emerge in a series of projects such as speed skating suits, snow wax cars, steel frame snowmobiles, snow groomers, snowmobiles, and Olympic operations.
The results of the comprehensive breakthrough of the Winter Olympics in science and technology can naturally be deduced through the formula of "wisdom + sweat", but there are actually more equations at the left end of the same solution.
03 The Secret of Overtaking
In September 2021, Urumqi, Xinjiang, the 21-22 China Cup Speed Skating Elite League began.
Gao Tingyu, the bronze medalist in the men's 500m speed skating at the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, set a new national record with a time of 33.83 seconds, which is also the third in the history of the project in the world.
Attentive viewers can find a detail in the broadcast footage, gao Tingyu's suit is only black and white.
▲ Gao Tingyu wore the seventh edition of speed skating clothes for the competition Source: Beijing Institute of Fashion
This seemingly monotonous dress, the connotation is not simple. It is the final competition suit created by Liu Li's team, although it is still in the stage of unstained sample clothes, but through the compound of two performance yarns, it has both super tough and super elastic properties, and after wind tunnel testing, it can reduce the resistance by more than 10%.
Behind this race suit, nearly 900 hours of wind tunnel testing, more than 100 fabrics are screened, and 100% painstaking effort is included.
The steel frame snowmobile that also accepts "going against the wind" in the wind tunnel has completed the optimization design of ten key points of appearance, which makes the wind resistance coefficient of domestic snowmobiles finally 8% lower than that of imported similar snowmobiles.
For the snow wax car team in Shandong, October 27, 2021 is destined to be an unforgettable moment. After 11 months of research and development, the first domestic snow wax car was successfully delivered.
On this snow wax truck with an area of 92.5 square meters, you can see The Yellow River Tractor of Sinotruk, the hydrogen fuel cell of Weichai Power, the air conditioning and air system of Haier, the intelligent display screen of Hisense, the on-board photovoltaic power generation, the AI intelligent physique detection machine for athletes to detect the physique, the 5G signal transmission, the VR experience... A foreign journalist lamented this – it is more like a platform for displaying "China's manufacturing capabilities".
A few days later, the snow wax truck that completed the delivery ceremony set off from Beijing and traveled more than 10,000 kilometers to meet the national ski team in Xinjiang for training.
In Xinjiang, the snow wax car has encountered a real test.
A cold wave caused the temperature to plummet to minus 30 degrees Celsius in November. But inside the carriage, from the resting athletes to the working waxers, they can wear single clothes and separate themselves from the outside of the car into a double world. It was also under the escort of this snow wax car that the Chinese cross-country skiing team won 7 gold, 4 silver and 4 bronze in the subsequent FIS points race.
The artificial snow team that has been stationed in the Chongli area of the Winter Olympic Games is applying a set of self-developed snow storage innovations.
The snow storage location of the race field is generally selected near the race slope. According to the traditional practice, relying on the experience model of "naked eye and human brain assessment" of the teacher, it is difficult to apply to different regions.
This has become the driving force for the development of intelligent design systems for snow storage piles. According to the geomorphological attributes of the site, the main elements affecting the design of the snowdrift and the local meteorological conditions as input parameters can be simulated and predicted for the changes in the morphology, quality and quality of the snowdrift (density, temperature, particle size, moisture content, etc.). According to the simulation output results, it can intelligently recommend a set of optimal design schemes for snow storage piles without space-time domain restrictions.
If you say, these "zero to one" stories mean breakthroughs. Then, at the Beijing Winter Olympics, there are still some "from one to zero" details, which are not easy to be noticed, but have new value and significance.
The torch relay is relayed and ignited into a roaring holy flame. However, few people know that unlike previous events, with the support of Alibaba Cloud, due to the use of 0 mechanical refrigeration technologies such as liquid cooling, all relay torches in the Beijing Winter Olympics have applied hydrogen fuel, achieving zero emissions from the torch relay. The Beijing Winter Olympics thus became the first Olympic event in human history to truly achieve carbon neutrality.
From "one to zero", it is not only a new value and meaning, but also the limit of efficiency and technology. Through alibaba cloud's accumulation of artificial intelligence and cloud computing technology, "Olympic Broadcast Cloud" can capture the wonderful moments of the Olympic Games with 0 dead angles, so that the broadcast of the event can achieve movie special effects, 0 hour difference accompanies the global audience, and hundreds of millions of people around the world can seamlessly connect with the Olympic Games.
The first digital smart ticketing system to complete the automatic allocation of seats in the super stadium in 30 seconds, and the first Winter Olympic public welfare runway promoted by 110 million donated public welfare steps, these scientific and technological extensions from Internet giants converged into the first exploration in the history of the Olympic Games.
With the national anthem playing at the Beijing Winter Olympics, it will not be long before "science and technology help great power competition" will definitely be written into history. But from "stuck neck" to "full overtaking", how did all this happen?
On the one hand, discovering user needs, meeting user needs, bringing new value and meaning to users, and constantly creating surprises are the values of science and technology; on the other hand, the principle of government centering scheduling and industrial chain coordination to ensure "concentrating on big things" is also a successful iron law that has been confirmed countless times.
But for China's technology industry chain, this is actually just the opening whistle of the second half.
Technology research and development is a breakthrough from scratch, from zero to one, but the combination of officials, production, learning and research, process improvement, yield improvement, cost optimization, and user feedback is the process from large to strong, and once it reaches the critical point of transcendence, it will erupt in the form of results.
In Beijing in the early spring and February of 2022, brilliant fireworks over the Winter Olympics site, brilliant performances at the opening ceremony, and fierce competition on the field were staged, but more exciting competitions always occurred outside the arena.
Resources:
[1] "Science and Technology Empower beijing Winter Olympics Snow Wax Car Snow Roller Localization Breakthrough", China Industry News Guo Yu
[2] "Overseas Ski Industry Looks At the Winter Olympics" XiaoKang Yuan Shuai
[3] "How to achieve "freedom with snow" at the Beijing Winter Olympics", Science and Technology Daily He Liang
[4] "In less than a year, the general secretary boarded China's first snow wax car", Dazhong Daily Yu Xiaobo
[5] "Aerospace Wind Tunnel Technology Helps Prepare for the Winter Olympics", China Aerospace News Miao Shanshan, Dong Guoqiang