Super Wheel springs to life w/weight to energy conversion, possible e-bike alternative

How much of the increased efficiency is lost by the extra weight of the wheel mechanism?

These types of things pop up now and again. Remember the one a few years back with weights that slid up and down the spokes?
The fact that this thing got a government (not USA) grant is probably the most mind boggling.

You know big oil will be buying this patent very soon. Can’t let this get out.

Can somebody please combine this with the Z cranks?

Sorry, unintentional double post.

How do you know if there’s an engineer in the room?

Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.

This wheel looks like some kind of funny joke though..

How much rolling resistance does a standard bike wheel really have? I’ll bet this thing decreases efficiency.

On the preorder page there is no information on wheel size, tire size, hub spacing, axle type, freehub type, weight…… It is “easy to fit on most bikes”.

This has got to be some high school business project

It’s not free energy people. You’re putting in more energy to move your mass forward. Your weight takes some of that energy and causes the tire and wheel to flatten. Apparently springs can store some of that energy and return it back to you. It’s increased efficiency. Not free energy. Geezsh.

Just to confirm then, regarding the “debunking” of this article/product, none of you geniuses has actually tried/tested the besmirched product IRL, correct?

People should really be paying more attention during their high school physics classes…
“Weight” can do work by converting potential energy to kinetic energy. Let’s say you ride on a road, and a bump kicks you up by 1 cm. If you weight 100 kg, you thus gain ~10 J in potential energy. You can then convert that energy to forward motion (kinetic energy) via your fancy wheel. If you do that once per second (a rather rattling ride) you have a gigantic 10 W you can use to go forward.
But of course, when you hit that bump that kicks you up, the newly created potential energy is not materializing out of thin air. You gain 10 J moving up, meaning that you loose 10 J from your kinetic energy (where else could that energy be coming from?). Hence you slow down.
The super-wheel can in theory help convert vertical motion back into forward motion, by avoiding the loss of that potential energy when you hit a bump. That’s also what a suspension on a bike can do (the most simple form of this suspension being the tires – especially when running at lower pressure).
Just keep in mind that the gain is tiny unless (1) you’re riding over really rough terrain, (2) 10 W is 30% of your power output (quick maths: don’t expect to win the TdF), (3) you’re riding on a perfectly flat road, so you don’t care about that big heavy piece of aluminum.
Always check with a high school physics nerd before writing about ‘magical’ stuff.

This is a thermodynamics conservation of energy problem. If your mass compresses the springs, you are building up potential energy. If this energy converts to wheel rotational force you must restore this PE. And by thermo laws you must add more PE energy than what was converted to wheel motion. So what’s the point?
This company is scamming customers at a rate of E396 a pop. I don’t think your mag should advertise this scam.

I cannot believe I am reading this unbelievable nonsense that contradicts laws of mechanics and thermodynamics here. I non-motorized bicycle is nothing but a lever to which human-generated power is applied. Any fixed power gets “distributed” between speed and force, literally determined by the chosen leverage. All those numerous gears, crank lengths, cassette ratios, gear inches etc. we have on our bikes — they all contribute to that leverage. Then there are friction losses.

“weight to energy conversion” — that sounds like a nuclear reaction to me, when we indeed can get energy from mass, remember E = mc². Do they hide a nuclear reactor somewhere there?

A nice quote from https://medium.com/techmagazine/perpetuum-mobile-e848ce9684b5 to sum this all up:

>The time between 1150 (??? – strange date — typo?) and 1775, when the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris stopped accepting proposals “concerning perpetual motion”, was the Wild Era of the Perpetuum Mobiles — everyone was inventing and building them left and right — demonstrating them to kings and masses for a nice fee.

> But of course, it would be naive to expect the idea of a perpetual motion machine to just die off because patent offices around the world, following the French Royal Academy, stopped accepting the applications.

I’m guessing that braking energy is stored in springs, and that is held as potential energy by locking the rotational position in with a ratchet. Then from a standing or slower start, the ratchet is released and the springs released accelerating the bicycle even with no human/battery power. The limiting factors are mechanical energy loss and extra weight.

Obviously not “free” or “perpetual” if it relies on constant input, but could it multiply force. Could be the next derailleur. Need to test on a single speed. I volunteer.

My previous post got deleted so I’ll try again.

I get the concept. Convert vertical deflection into rotational movement. Sounds similar to how Slingshot Bicycles’ frames worked. They converted vertical deflection into forward motion. They really did work, provided you were using a rigid fork. I had one of their early 90s frames (when they were all cromoly and very light) and the bike was much faster on flat, winding trails than any other mtb I’d ridden. (including an early Merlin I had) You had to actually try it to believe it. The rise of suspension forks killed it though. Suspension forks would absorb the forward bump that the Slingshot frame was providing making the frame kind of pointless. Would be great if they revived the design for gravel bikes.

So, the “Superwheel,” I’m not crazy about the name. I wouldn’t knock it till I’d tried it though, but I also wouldn’t buy it till I tried it. I’m skeptical, based on how heavy the whole thing looks. I also wonder, even if it did work for a while, how long till all those moving parts in the wheel begin to fail in their movement and it just becomes a really heavy rear wheel?