Welcome to the Team ERSB website 
We are all very excited to be part of a team dedicated to creating a functional emergency release mechanism for snowboard bindings.
Meet the Team
From left to right: Michael Allen,Blake Anderson,Gavin Mehraban, Matthew Sartori,Michael Weidner, David Call, Jason Wendel.
You can visit any team members personal page by clicking on their name above, or on the menu bar to the left.
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Contact Information
Our team has a public website that we created. Click here to visit it. We also have an email account set up, so we can get suggestions and concerns from all snowboarders. Send us your comments to ersnowbinding@gmail.com.
Problem Statement
In the event of an avalanche, a snowboard can cause a snowboarder to become buried deeper in the snow, decreasing the odds of survival. The objective of the Emergency Release Snowboard Binding is to provide snowboarders with a means of detaching their snowboard at the first sign of an avalanche.
Project Summary
Snowboarding has grown immensely since the mid 1970’s, booming to a sport with 5.6 million participants in 2002, and continuing to grow in popularity. With increasing numbers of snowboarders and advances in equipment such as the split-board, backcountry snowboarding is also becoming more popular. Backcountry snowboarding draws participants in, with promises of adventures on un-crowded mountainsides with miles of fresh powder to carve.
With the promises of the backcountry comes the dangerous reality of avalanches, very often caused by the snowboarders themselves. During the 2004–2005 season there were 158 unintentional human triggered avalanches in Utah alone, killing 8 people. Snowboarders are more likely to be killed in an avalanche than skiers; the snowboard itself acts as an anchor in an avalanche, forcing the person wearing it deeper into the turbulent snow. This proves to be highly deadly, as it increases the time necessary for rescue, as the chances of surviving an avalanche decrease exponentially with time. Statistics suggest that a person has only a 50% chance of survival if found within the first 30 minutes of being buried. For this reason, it is believed that removal of the board is a crucial factor in the survival of a person caught in an avalanche. Currently no device exists that allows a snowboarder to quickly detach the board.
With this problem in mind, a project is proposed to design a product for use by snowboarders to quickly separate the snowboard from the snowboarder, thereby increasing the user’s chance of survival in the event of an avalanche. This project will be run by a team of seven, senior-level mechanical engineering students at the University of Utah and will be advised by Professor E. Bamberg. The primary focus of the project will be removal of the board from the snowboarder. As mentioned earlier, separation of the board is very important, and quickly removing the board will give the user a better chance for surviving the avalanche. A secondary focus will be to add other features that can help save a victim in the event of an avalanche. These features will focus on assisting in the rescue efforts, keeping the snowboarder near the surface, and increasing the probability of self-removal. Besides effectively fulfilling its function, the design will need to be something that people want to use and buy, as well as something that companies want to make and sell.
To reach these goals, a systematic approach will be taken to the design of the emergency snowboard release. Customer needs will be determined. Concept generation and concept selection will be performed with these needs in mind. Once a concept is selected, a detailed design will be created, prototyped, and tested.
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