Skating the Eiffel Tower
 

What do you do after creating a beach on the banks of the Seine? You create a skating rink in the air.

There is now an ice-skating rink 57 metres above the ground at the Eiffel Tower ... here's the link:

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4086757.stm

Anselm

Skipping the Eiffel Tower.

I skipped the ET.

Weighing the Eiffel Tower rink.

I wonder how much excess load capacity M. Eiffel designed into his creation. The rink measures 200 square meters, so it weighs about 2,000 kg. per cm. of thickness.

Let's assume tht it's 10 cm thick. That's just the same as 200 (hefty) people (or 500 supermodels).

Presumably, the human population and restaurant/souvenir business(es) add 5-20 times this amount of increases/decreases in load, nearly 24/7.

Speaking out eternally against innumeracy...

Best wishes,

Rex

I don't disagree with your supposition that the daily dynamic load is distributed all over the tower.

But the ice rink is a static load of 20,000 kg. (plus the mass of the skaters ~5000 kg.) concentrated in a 10x20 meter space that may or may not have been designed to support it. Hardly an equivalent situation. Without knowing the yield strength of puddled iron and the cross-section of the supporting structures, I can go no further.

(By the way, Strength of Materials is the most difficult course ever encountered in an engineering curriculum. I designed a t-shirt saying "ME311 Will Test Your Mettle.")

So.. accusing you of innumeracy is way off base. I apologize. Whatcha wanna bet tht they paid a lot to engineers to obtin the best data possible before doing this. and even more to the lawyers. Probably even lawyers in the US cashed in on this somehow.

Of course, nobody ever said that risk management was supposed to be cost-free.