Engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University are spending this week trying to make ice rinks safer for the hometown hockey team and other players.
The students are being challenged by the Pittsburgh Penguins to develop solutions to improve ice rink dasher boards and glass and are developing prototypes that eventually could be submitted for review by the National Hockey League and USA Hockey, a youth hockey association.
To develop the prototypes, the students are using materials from Covestro, the German plastics maker which has its North American headquarters in Robinson.
The Penguins recently named Covestro as its official innovation partner and the challenge at CMU, dubbed “Rethink the Rink,” is the first project the partnership has undertaken.