Remember those wind-up toy cars you pull back & let go? What if you put one of those springs in a bike wheel so when you stopped at a light you could get that momentum back again? The idea is so simple – perfect for a bicycle.
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Because Today’s Great Ideas start with Yesterday’s Foolish Thinking
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Update: Here’s a great discussion thread on this topic:
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Regenerative_20Brake_20Bike
The question remains, why HASN’T someone made this yet?
Also, even as I posted this sketch using a metal spring, I’ve been also thinking of using a pneumatic air tank. It’d be expensive, but maybe we could even use one of the carbon fiber air tanks from a paint ball gun. You could even fill it before your ride and get an extra boost right from the start. Then of course there is always the chemical battery option, but that definitely seems too expensive.
That’s a nice stab at the problem. Most cyclists would probably shun the weight, and some would avoid it because of the looks.
Air tanks would be too heavy, although you could use the bike’s frame tubes to hold some air. But you’d still need a compressor.
But back to the spring idea, I’ve wondered about stressing the bike frame in order to hold the energy. It takes a lot of bending on a bike tube it just a little bit.
I don’t know how you’d get the energy from the wheels into the frame though. Maybe a racheting device?
Interesting idea . . .
Mark
But, I still don’t get it. The cars had to be pulled backwards, so unless you want to flip your bike around at the intersection and shoot out backwards and then do Bond style turn, It seems kinda silly… But I would LOVE to see regenerative braking on a bike. Perhaps a flywheel of sorts?
Let’s get serious. Energy costs will continue to rise and we need a new way of generating electricity for a community. A Reliable source of energy that doesn’t rely on burning fossil fuels but rather on the community of people that uses the energy.
At the superbowl in Glendale last year, people in local community were recruited to supply their “human energy” by pedaling 42 stationary bikes over 40 hours in honor of Super Bowl XLII. Each bicycle was equipped with a generator and battery mounted to it in order to convert energy into electricity; the energy flowing from the generators was stored in the batteries. At the end of each day, the power was uploaded from the batteries to the Phoenix, Arizona power grid, culminating in enough energy to power 30-minutes of the pre-game show and the AMP Energy event.
Why isn’t this a event that happens everyday? Think of all the health clubs alone that could put energy onto the local power grid.
How hard can it be to set up if they did it in a tent at the superbowl?
Let’s put this together…. I need a venture capitalist out there to help make this a reality. Regenerative braking technology must be put to work by every community to generate their own energy needs.
The energy to process and produce the food to feed the humans far outweighs what a human would produce.
@ Conrad B:
Nice catch Conrad. The solution would be this: When you apply the breaks to activate the spring, they would shift a gear box to change the direction of the spring. This would be a simplified version of what your car transmission does when you shift into reverse- the motor still turns the same direction, but the gear box adds an extra wheel in the gears so that the axle spins backwards.
@Jake and Scott J:
thanks, but the point isn’t to save the world from an energy shortage with this device, it’s just to add a little something to your biking experience. It’s true that human muscle power is insignificant compared to our energy demands – to try to feed the grid with human power will always be an impossible bootstrapping scheme. However, the benefit of making our human powered devices more elegant and efficient is that it means people will have one more reason not to drive. It’s a small step towards awareness and placing an increased focus on local pedestrian scale activities.
Thanks everyone, keep the comments coming -
ThinkSketch
selfpost!
nice – adapt any bike into an electric bike
http://www.engadget.com/2009/02/26/greenwheel-converts-any-huffy-10-speed-into-an-electric-bicycle/#continued
Believe in the concept and would love to see it come to fruition.
A friend and I are working on it.
Thanks for the input/creative thinking.
Most people ride bicycles for exercise ( of course there are exceptions to this ).
For those people who do ues it for excercise, having the bike do the work for you would not be an option.
It’s not about the exercise factor at all – it’s about urban riding. The safest place to be on a city street is ahead of the traffic flow – bikes suffer from poor accelleration compared to cars to the only way to stay ahead is to blow traffic/stop signs (plus conserving our momentum is a kind of big deal).
The only way I see urban riding while obeying traffic laws to be practical and safe is to have regenerative breaking allowing me to accelerate quicker off the line and stay out ahead of the wave of angry metal death pressing behind me.
I would absolutely worship regenerative breaking
City traffic doesn’t accelerate that fast. Work on your sprint
Bike regen would help a little, but 15mph to 0 won’t take you back to 15, maybe 10mph if it’s a really efficient system.
You’re far better off just riding an efficient lightweight road bike, which will accelerate much better than a typical casual biker’s bike.
Does anyone know how heavy the steel spring would need to be to start a rider of average weight up from a dead stop?
I had such a thought this morning, and Googled “spring powered accelleration bicycle” to find this thread. Matt, keep working on it, and lets keep the discussion going.
Conrad B., from the look of this simplified concept/sketch, I’d guess that the simplist way (at least in terms of design) is that the spring gets “loaded” simply by backpedeling (or at least applying some reverse resistance to the motion) upon decellerating towards a stop sign. This is similar to how riders of fixed-gear bikes stop all the time. And my non-expert understand is that back-pedalling does not feel as taxing on the human muscle as one might expect.
At any rate, the rider could choose when and how much to resist, or how much to use a handbrake instead. Of course, the spring could likely be loaded by some other more-complicated mechanism that does decellerate the bike without any effort, or any need to backpedal.