What kind of engineer designs roller coasters

The decision is on your own, you can continue navigating through the site accepting the bugs it might bring. I am interested in becoming an engineer and would like to eventually work for a roller coaster company.

I would like to know which specialization I should go for my degree. That is an interesting question. There will be a lot of engineers that support the design and installation of a rollercoaster;. ME with the car and rail designs, structural engineers for obvious reasons, electrical and software for the controls, safety engineers, manufacturing engineers for making the parts and cars, construction engineers during the build, etc.

The over architect of the roller coaster may be a physicist. Sandy recommends the following next steps :. No specific major exists in roller coaster engineering, though a design team is typically made up of structural, electrical and mechanical engineers.

Many universities offer bachelor's degree engineering programs in these disciplines. Students interested in designing roller coasters should consider including additional physics, mathematics and drafting courses to their curricula. The main responsibilities of a roller coaster engineer are deciding where the tracks should be placed, picking the right roller coaster for a particular environment and making sure all aspects are safe with each roller coaster. To make sure rides are safe, these engineers test them out, making sure all of the weights and speeds are set correctly.

Aspiring engineers often need a license, though requirements vary by state. I like what Mr. Arche replied with. Most projects take a number of engineering and technical fields as he indicated. Good luck. The engineer who designs the coaster must spend time on the computer to analyze the safety and performance of it, in addition to identifying parts specifications and energy usage, among other problems.

The engineer must supervise the construction of the roller coaster model to get funding for it. After the design is approved, the engineer must supervise its construction on the job site to ensure that it's being built to plan specifications. The mechanics of roller coaster design must also take into consideration the cost of building the machine. The roller coaster engineer must be able modify the design or materials used in the design to meet park specifications, including cost.

In addition, the engineer must consider the ride's safety as the top priority. Failing to consider this aspect could open up the engineer to liability issues in the event the coaster harms its passengers. As a result, the coaster must undergo rigorous testing before it's open for business.

Finally, roller coaster engineers work closely with the planning team at the amusement park or an internal representative thereof to ensure the ride meets specifications related to theme, size and intended user experience. It's essential that the ride provide a safe, enjoyable experience for the target audience of the theme park. SoI can see why, if civil engineers are like that, why you'd be spending most of your time in a faint.

This may not be quite as useful as you first hoped, and I'm sorry that a rollercoaster enthusiast forum can't quite achieve structural enlightenment, in fact, structured sarcasm may be about as far as you get Unless you pretend to be female, in which case you'll have a good dozen PMs from people all wanted to add you to Facebook and help you out as much as they can. It's always worth considering you know, along with the posting on a complete irrelevant website, a sex change may well be the kind of dramatic and out of the box thinking you need to land your dream job?

Good luck, and please, come back and let us know how you get on? UC, you need to replace yours Treeis Mega Poster. I'm hoping to get into mechanical or design engineering when I go into university. Im currently in As levels year 12 and my favourite subject I do so far is Mechanics. I love being able to calculate acceleration and free fall. Plus because of rollercoasters, I have alot of real life examples to practice and revise mechanics. I know that "designing a rollercoaster" is a bit of a long shot carreer wise, but Im happy to fall back on any engineering job.

Treeis said:. Click to expand Here is a screen shot of a job opening from Vekoma. It states the things needed to work in such a area and other helpful things.

GeForce Roller Poster. Jarrett Most Obnoxious Member I think it's a bit of everything, but mostly mechanical. I'm studying mechanical in hopes of doing that with my life. However, I think there's other types of engineers that ride hardware and the like.

Civil engineers, for instance, also work on coasters. Pokemaniac Mountain monkey Staff member. I'm studying civil engineering now, and while I don't take the structural mechanics courses, I know enough about them to say that they're really heavy stuff, requiring that you know calculus pretty much to the fingertips.

Good luck trying to get such a degree. However, for those who can make it, and are motivated enough to pull it through, it's one of the best educations you can get, job-wise. Any company that works with engineering - almost no matter the field - need folks who can calculate loads and design components that can withstand them - from household electronics to cargo ships via buildings and structures and cars and A coaster being a very complicated structure, with very interesting dynamic load situations, no wonder why you have to know pretty heavy stuff before you're allowed to design one.

Putting it up once designed, on the other hand, is really nothing special. There might be some special welds here or there, but the entire shebang is delivered like a puzzle from the factory, with extremely detailed assembly instructions, so with the proper tools it's almost routine work.