How to keep the rubber on the road bikes

A team of engineers from the Netherlands, bike-loving nation, balance and stability study the physics of the bike. You have previously determined not identified factors that a bike remains upright. With what they have learned, the researchers have developed a number of exceptional design, which would have been thought to be not stable.

Bicycle abuse is not something that you would expect from the Dutch. But engineers in the Netherlands, that enough love bikes, to violate it are a long-held beliefs about how a moving bike keeps its balance even if defeated, pushing or otherwise offended challenge.

The team found so far unidentified factors, with which a bicycle remain upright and has developed a number of exceptional designs that would have been thought not stable.

"We believe there is room for improving the handling qualities of the bikes," says Arend Schwab, Professor of mechanics at the Technical University of Delft.

A conventional bicycle is remarkably stable when you move. It can coast for long distances without a driver and catch even fall. As early as 1910, credited scientists this stability on the front wheel acts like a gyroscope. How a spinning wheel is, should it course can be rotated in the direction of lean, direct the bike in a curve that maintains it.

1970 Tested E.H. Jones, then an astronomer of British chemical company ICI, this Declaration by trying build a unridable David. An extra on the steering wheel attached to its frame spun backwards and canceled the gyro effect. This bike was less stabil-- but still mobile, also with no hands.

Jones another stabilizing effect sought and found one similar to what holds the roles of the shopping carts lined up. You keep a still cycling through the seat, lean it to the page and gravity turns the wheel. This "trail effect" is based on the front wheel position relatively to the angle of the steer axis that connects the wheel on the handlebars. The wheel forward a few inches, Jones discovered, and a traditional bike is less stable.

Published in physics today, understand the paper, describes these experiments widely, and was a junior high school in Corvallis, Oregon/United States of Jim Papadopoulos, a competitive cyclist, read not the mathematics at first. But later, in the graduate school, its conclusions would it.

"Me 30 years, my finger on the big mistake, took it" says Papadopoulos, now as an engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Stout in Graz. "Jones paper not was on Physics of falling slightly, but based on the physics of something taking place."

Papadopoulos working with a scientist from Cornell and a team in the Netherlands, that a bike with no built in gyroscopic or trail effects. Their unmounted apparatus, the sports two extra backward rotating wheels and a front wheel, which touches the ground before the steer axis, Coast can always still stable. Give a smack, and it draws curves, and recovered.

"You need no gyroscope or trail, a bike make self-stable," says Andy Ruina, Professor of mechanical engineering at Cornell and co-author of the paper, the bicycle describes 15 science in April.

Bicycles, that team suggests, are more complicated, than previously thought. While gyro and trail effects can contribute to the stability, other factors such as the distribution of mass and the bike can play moment of inertia, as well as a role. Computer simulations that take into account all these factors to improved designs for bicycles with small wheel folding bikes, carrying cargo could lead Ruina says.

To demonstrate the possibilities outlined several new exotic bicycle designs researchers. One is expected to have a negative gyro remain stable, which tried to turn a bike falling in the wrong direction. In another the steer axis will be distinguished vice versa further bar forward as the center of the front wheel.

"they found a design with rear-wheel steering, which can be ridden and is self-stable,", David Gordon Wilson, a former MIT Professor of the modern recumbent in the early 1970s says designed. "This is pretty amazing."

In the simulations, this new design principles still work if is added to the weight of a human being. But the real test is waiting on the street.

"The next step would be to study a bike with a driver in the real world: on actual roads under different operation of the machine, on a fully instrumented bike," says Joel Fajans, a plasma physicist, bicycles at the University of California studies, Berkeley. "To find out how we really ride a bike."

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