Amusement park rollercoaster design
Bachelor Industrial Design Engineering 2021
This project took place in my final year of the Bachelor of Industrial Design Engineering. The goal of this project was to teach us how to work in large teams with the help of system engineering. Therefore, the project team consisted of 12 members, subdivided into 6 teams of 2. The challenge here was to design a ride for an amusement park together. To do this, the design of the ride was divided into 5 systems: entrance, load & unload platforms, ride décor, ride mechanics, and exit. Each team was responsible for the design of one and one team was responsible for keeping all the teams together and cohesive.
At the start, it was collectively decided that we wanted to design a roller coaster for the Efteling. As the Efteling themes all its rides around fairytale stories, we wanted to do the same. The story of Thumbelina was chosen, as this fairytale is not represented in the park yet.
In this project, I was part of the team taking on the system of the load & unload platforms. The challenge with this system is that these platforms connect all the other systems. The entrance system is connected to the load platform, which in turn is connected to the ride, which is connected to the unload platform, which is then connected to the exit system. To make sure that everything connects, an N2 diagram was constructed and used.
To allow for continuation in the story, the load platform and unload platform are separated, however, their system design is roughly the same. To make designing this system more comprehensible, four subsystems were identified: the gates, the exit door, the ride doors, and the train control, where the exit door subsystem is only present in the unload platform system.
Load platform system design
Gate subsystem
Exit doors subsystem
Ride doors subsystem
Train control subsystem
The next challenge was to fit our designed systems into the floor plan as designed by the system engineers (the team in charge of the cohesion of the design). Between the unload and load platform there is room to store extra carts for the train.
The story to be told with this ride is that of Thumbelina. The park visitor is shrunk to the size of an insect in the entrance system. Then at the load platform, the visitors step onto a bee, which then takes them on a wild flight following the story of Thumbelina and her friends. Finally, the visitors arrive at the castle of the king at the unload platform, where they disembark from the bee and enter the castle for the wedding to the exit system. To make sure that our platforms fit into the story, styling impressions and rough sketches were created for both platforms.
Load platform stying impression
unload platform stying impression
To get a full overview of the ride design, one must see all the systems together. Therefore, all the posters created for this project by all teams are included below and can be downloaded below.
This project was done in cooperation with; Rowen Aker, Galina Veldkamp, Anna Bokdam, Roel Spierenburg, Sam van Limburg Stirum, Jan Schagen, Dion Siekmans, Pelle van der Ploeg, Belle Wetselaar, Peter Hepburn, and Julia Cyrkel.
This project was done as an educational project for the University of Twente, there is no official connection to the Efteling, all their rights are reserved to them.