Over the years, thousands of athletes have competed on the Mondo athletics tracks installed at twelve Olympic stadiums (from Montreal 1976 through to the exceptional performance on the track of the Olympic stadium in Tokyo), seventeen world outdoor championships and thirteen world indoor championships, achieving extraordinary results, setting world records and exceeding their limits.
It is indisputable: performance on Mondo prefabricated tracks is exceptional. The numbers speak clearly: 68% of the world records during world championships have been set on Mondo prefabricated tracks.
This is due to the investments that the company has made in R&D over its 70+ years of operations.
The Mondo R&D team is made up of technicians with over 20 years’ experience in the formulation and production processes of technical items in rubber. For all the products’ technical properties and for quality control, the group has a fully equipped laboratory at its disposal, set up for preparation of prototypes and for performing chemical, thermal and mechanical analyses.
Numerous technologies have been developed over the years which have been applied to surfaces for athletics tracks: as it is prefabricated, the product is indeed designed on the basis of scientific studies and manufactured under tightly controlled production conditions, with careful selection of raw materials and numerous tests performed during manufacturing to assess the technical characteristics and elastic response.
Mondo's tracks have two key distinctive characteristics: the lower layer composed of a series of hexagonal cavities, and the surface embossing, which guarantees a greater contact surface and efficient drainage.
The lower layer of Mondo tracks, with a honeycomb design, features a system of air cells composed of a uniform network of hexagonal cavities, appropriately lengthened in the running direction. The geometric honeycomb construction can be deformed in three dimensions: this accelerates the movement of the foot What’s more, as the athlete’s foot leaves the surface, the air compressed inside the cells causes them to spring back to their original shape, acting like bowstrings and projecting the athlete upwards and forwards, ensuring an optimal energy response to the athletic action.
The surface embossing has been designed to improve grip so that penetration of spikes is not necessary to obtain the correct grip, either in wet or dry conditions. This allows athletes to improve their performance by using progressive compression spikes in order to ensure optimum deflection of the track surface and eliminate the time and energy required for the spikes to penetrate and withdraw.
The R&D team boasts a high level of skills and expertise in the field of knowledge of materials and their iteration in the design and production of sports surfaces, but to incorporate these with experimental activities in other areas, the R&D group has made use of highly qualified university partnerships for some years.
The goal is to further improve the iteration between the sports surface and cutting-edge athletics footwear: by working on the mechanical behavior of the material, the R&D team aims to optimize the energy returned by the track even when placed under different loads, such as those generated by athletes running, jumping or throwing. The design of a product as complex as an athletics track requires multidisciplinary skills and expertise, as well as a holistic approach: safety and performance are the result of complex polymer formulations and precise choices in the form of the different layers of the track. In this area, knowledge of chemistry and physics are as fundamental as understanding the interaction between the athlete and the surface and knowledge of sports science and biomechanics.
We know that by using modern finite elements analysis software (FEM/FEA) and complex mathematical models for representing materials it is possible to create physical simulations and study the behavior of a technical solution without passing through the production process. With this goal, Mondo has begun a new research project which also aims to effectively simulate foams and visco-hyperelastic materials, thanks to collaboration with Prof. Luca Andena, Science and Technology of Materials lecturer at Polytechnic University of Milan.
The cooperation between MONDO and Polytechnic University of Milan has led to the development of a 3D mathematical model and an athletics track and initial experiments using a virtual Berlin athlete, the tool used to measure the energy absorption and vertical deformation of a track subjected to the footfall of a running athlete. This simulation was created to run tests on virtual tracks, and the results obtained compared with real samples to verify the accuracy of the model. This study allowed us to take the first steps towards designing virtual prefabricated tracks, whose mechanical response can be measured with precision before the creation of a physical prototype and has demonstrated the model's potential to simulate the effect of modifications to the substrate cavities.
We explain this project in greater detail in this article.