Much like the first unit of Design And Engineering, in the second and last unit, we've been focusing on design with a specific purpose. In the last unit, we were focusing on design for elderly people and finding a gardening tool that caters to their needs, but in this unit, we focused on designing a bicycle for a specific person. We were assigned an imaginary person's profile with their needs for a mode of transportation. To get insight on how to design while taking into account specific things, we reached out to DIVVY. They gave us a little background as to how they come up with their innovations and gave us tips and tricks to make it easier. Using the culmination of their advice and my own intuitive design, this is what I came up with.
The profile I was assigned was that of a 12-year-old boy named Miguel. He lives in Sitges, Spain which is a small town usually crawling with tourists. His dilemma is that he lives 1.5 miles from school and because it's crowded, it's often very difficult to bike two and from school. He also lives on the third floor of an apartment which is also difficult for little Miguel to get his bike to and from school. Part of Miguel's dilemma is similar to many people, that ride bikes. Just the sheer weight of a bike makes it difficult to put on a rack in a garage. One of my friends said that "most bikes are just really heavy and difficult to transport in something like a car. It's hard enough to get something as big as a bike in a car, but the bike being heavier doesn't help one bit". With my design, all of these issues are resolved.
 |
JH, basic design, 2020
|
 |
JH, digital sketch, 2020
|
My design features a foldable style, lighter frame, and an overall thinner and sleeker design. As you can see from the images above, my bike has two folds. One a little bit farther than the wheel ends and vice versa. The handle for carrying is actually the bar that is that main portion of the frame. using that as a handle allows for better control and grip over the entire bike itself. My design also uses aluminum throughout the entire build. Using something like aluminum for the base material allows for the bike's primary weight to come from the wheels. the rest of the bike is light and manageable.
Because the bike's wheels are the only parts of the bike that aren't light due to aluminum, I decided to calculate how big they were in relation to how long Miguel has to bike. Doing this gave me an idea of whether the wheel's being the average weight would affect the bike's overall performance. the first step in doing all the calculations was to set a radius, diameter, and circumference for the wheel itself. The radius was 10 inches , the diameter was 20 inches and the circumference was 62.832 inches. the last step was to consider how fast Miguel would be going. Because he's 12 I infered that he would be able to bike about 7 miles in an hour. Given that speed and the circumfrence of 62.832 inches I calculated that he would be moving at about 3.1286111 meters per second. with all of that information I was able to figure out how many times his wheels would rotate on his journey of 1.5 miles, which was about 1512.60504 times. To support such a distance with these wheels, his weight, and the weight of whatever he's carrying he's going to need a gear composite that's structured enough to handle it. For this I would use a 36 tooth gear attached to a 12 tooth gear for that has a second gear of 12 attached to a 24 tooth gear for and overall gear ratio of 5 to 2.
I also made a model of the bike using foamcore material. The model doesn't really display my innovations, but it was very helpful in properly assessing what changes needed to be made to my design. See the model below.
 |
JH, 3D model, 2020
|
Comments
Post a Comment