Technology in cycling is huge. It’s almost getting to be like a Formula One style with
the amount of changes and wind tunnel testing
and you know there are things that you can change on a bike – there’s so many different
components that you can work with.
The implications of science, the difference that’s made to the bike itself
to the equipment that we use um it’s overall effect
on speed and performance.
Technological advances and research from the Formula One and Aerospace Industries over
the past twenty years have helped to develop the traditional steel tube bike into a high
tech aerodynamic piece of science influenced design.
The carbon fibre Lotus bike in 1992 heralded the advent of this new wave of development.
The Lotus bike came from a guy called Mike Burrows who is his original idea and he just
said well wings is what people use in other industries to cut through air
so why do we make it a collection of tubes? We’ve got this wonderful
new material, carbon fibre, that we can shape it
however we like and it will still be structurally sound.
When we started out and we were looking at making aerodynamic tubes out of steel there
was always so much that you could squeeze around the tube into an aero shape before
you would start to see cracks and things like that.
The aluminium got a little bit better so you could make perfect shapes on a tube
before as where you joined those tubes together you
were still quite limited. There were just certain shapes that would come together and
then you – you weld it.
And now with carbon also the joints and every part of the bike you can
shape it in whichever way you want more or less and then just have to figure out how
to make that shape strong enough so that you can ride it.
The material itself, carbon fibre just opens up so many possibilities for construction.
Well I think with carbon fibre you combine a couple of advances. The first one is it’s
very light for its specific stiffness and strength so
you can make something that’s very strong.
It’s very stiff so all the power you put into the bike goes into your propulsion instead of deforming
the frame and yet it weighs very little so that’s
the one major advance. The other one is the form
freedom. You can make any shape you want so now its possible to make tubes very
aerodynamic instead of round or almost round. And when you look at the Periodic Table you
see that there is no element left that could do a better job of this so there is not really
any reason to move to a different material.
The use of this revolutionary material necessitated the introduction of computer aided design
software to facilitate the creation of technologically advanced light, stiff but workable bikes.
When you look at computer simulation you simulate for stiffness and strength. You can
simulate what the weight will be. You can if you have a carbon fibre because a carbon
fibre frame consists of say between two hundred
and five hundred pieces of carbon so small pieces that you lay on the frame in certain
directions. So there - if a certain tube has ten
layers you want to test what happens if we change this layer or that layer. So there’s
a lot of computer simulation that you can do to really
speed up the development process.
And with the aid of computer modelling you can tell the computer how many layers of this
type of carbon fibre you’ve used, what resin, it will computer simulate the shape and bend
it and say yes, this is strong enough and stiff enough.
Its performance is directional so you have the fibre and in the direction of the fibre
the performance is very different from perpendicular
to that fibre. So if you have a piece of carbon fibre and all the fibres are laying
in a certain direction it makes a lot of difference whether you put the piece on the frame like
this – or like this. It completely changes the
stiffness and the strength. So the only way to do that properly is on the computer so
that you get a ready ninety or ninety five per cent
to the final design and then you make a prototype. You test it, you find out things that the computer missed.
Bringing together several different technologies has been
just revolutionised bicycle design.
With the combination of new materials and design software producing highly innovative
bikes research focused on the position of the rider
to create a unit giving maximum performance as a whole.
To this end computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel testing were introduced
from other industries where aerodynamics is of prime importance.
The year that I worked in Formula One the
experimentation became very, very important and
that was because we were looking for really small incremental gains all the time. And
I think that skill was probably the most important
skill that I brought across to doing aerodynamic development in the bicycle industry.
We fitted many – people now in this wind tunnel over two hundred and fifty amateur
and professional riders and the one thing that
always comes home is that ultimately it’s the
achieving the position is the fundamental requirement.
In achieving the optimum position both speed and comfort are considerations.
However, with maximum performance as the ultimate goal one must take precedence over the other.
I think when we’re talking about you know top performance sport comfort is not really
a consideration. So obviously there if you can
be faster in an uncomfortable position – you’ll take it. So with power basically set by your
lungs and your heart it then comes down to what
position can you get the most aerodynamic in and is it at all possible to hold that
position for whatever time that the event is.
Barney and I spent a huge amount of time at home in our garage which is ultimately a
process Chris Boardman went through ironically of looking at what I'm doing; taking
photographs, using a mirror and deciding what looks to be the most aerodynamic and then
ultimately we can take that out every Wednesday evening in the summer onto a time trial race
on the same course and test it. And ultimately the conditions do change a bit with the wind
but we can actually test out new positions, work out looking at power trials, looking
at the time overall whether the position has changed and
helped or whether it’s actually hindered.
When I was training we used the wind tunnel looking at finding the optimal position for
each rider and the interaction with the bike itself.
You might have a very aerodynamic bike that you’ve produced but the interaction between
the bike and the rider is the most important thing
and that can have implications between me winning a gold medal and not winning a gold medal.
With continued investment in the science of the sport of cycling what does the future
hold for bike design and performance at a lead level?
And where will these ideas be drawn from?
I really see a trend towards further system integration so I rally see that the components
and the wheels and the frame all come together
and are designed together. We already started doing that so that when we design a frame
we talk to the wheel manufacturer and see what
they're working on so that we know for sure that in the end all those things work together
nicely both from an aerodynamic and from a structural point of view.
So we see a big trend towards that and the other big trend is electronics.
We see that in shifting. We see hydraulics in brakes so there's just some new technologies,
not necessarily new in the world but new you know to the bike industry that will start
to take over certain functions of the bike.
There's a lot of learning from people who have parallels so as you mentioned the aerospace
industry, the Formula One industry, people who face similar challenges. I don’t know
about bikes but there is common ground expertise.
But also you can also look for stimulus in the
natural world because there's billions of years of evolution there that has arrived
at designs and we don’t know why. So for example we
know in the last four or five years we’re exploring
shark skins for hydrodynamics and you know is the scaly denticle skin when you put it
under the microscope is that for replacement factor
or is that actually to do with micro vortices that
help – help hydrodynamics, you know. So it’s all being explored. So there's a lot
of good ideas just come out of the natural world if you look.