Explanation how does a bike work

The further apart you space your arms, the more air resistance you create. The typical outer parts of the handlebars are for steering, and the inner parts are for gliding. The apparently simple two-wheeled machine uses momentum, force, and friction and converts energy to get riders to their destination. Hey there!

I also work to improve our web appearance and functionality by designing new landing pages and populating product pages with valuable resources and information. In my free time, you can often find me watching a sporting event or frequenting the local Mexican restaurants! Beyond The Classroom.

In The Classroom. Elementary School. Middle School. Contact Us. Online Help Desk. All Product and Order Support. In , his father Michael, an applied mathematician from England, started a job at Oregon State University.

But Michael Papadopoulos was denied tenure after protesting against the Vietnam War, setting off a decade-long legal battle with the university that left him out of a job and the family scouring rubbish bins for scraps. Jim's mother killed herself in the early s. He found solace in bikes. He pedalled his Peugeot AO8 around town and grew his hair to his shoulders. He stopped going to classes, and his grades took a tumble.

At 17, he dropped out of school and left home. But before he abandoned his studies, a teacher gave him the Jones article. Papadopoulos found it captivating but confusing. He spent the summer bumming around Berkeley, California, reading George Arfken's textbook Mathematical Methods for Physicists in his spare time. Then, he worked at a plywood mill in Eugene, Oregon, earning enough money to buy the legendary Schwinn Paramount that he raced every weekend.

In , he worked for the frame builder Harry Quinn in Liverpool, UK, but he was terrible at it and Quinn asked him to leave. Papadopoulos returned to Oregon in , spent a year at the state university and then started undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT in Cambridge. He did well. Oil company Exxon later supported him as he studied for a PhD in fracture mechanics. Papadopoulos's adviser, Michael Cleary, was optimistic about his prospects as an academic.

Papadopoulos had other ideas. The two became fast friends. When Ruina got a job at Cornell, he hired Papadopoulos as a postdoc. Papadopoulos convinced Ruina that bicycle companies — like oil companies — might be interested in supporting academic research. So he started fund-raising, reaching out to bike makers. Papadopoulos's first goal was to finally understand what makes one bicycle more stable than another.

He sat in his office and scrutinized 30 published attempts at writing the equations of motion for a bicycle. The equations were the first step towards connecting the geometry of a bicycle frame with how it handled, but each new model made little or no reference to earlier work, many were riddled with errors and they were difficult to compare. He needed to start from scratch. After a year of work, he had what he believed to be the definitive set of equations in hand.

Now it was time for them to talk back to him. He first rewrote the bicycle equations in terms of the caster trail, the crucial variable that Jones had championed.

He expected to find that if the trail was negative, the bicycle would be unstable, but his calculations suggested otherwise. In a report that he prepared at the time, he sketched a bizarre bicycle with a weight jutting out in front of the handlebars. No single variable, it seemed, could account for self-stability. This discovery meant that there was no simple rule-of-thumb that could guarantee that a bike is easy to ride. Trail could be useful. Gyroscopic effects could be useful.

Centre of mass could be useful. For Papadopoulos, this was revelatory. The earliest frame builders had simply stumbled on a design that felt OK, and had been riding around in circles in that nook of the bicycle universe. There were untested geometries out there that could transform bike design. After two years, Ruina could no longer support Papadopoulos.

Apart from the bike manufacturer Murray, the only industry donations the two ever got were from Dahon and Moulton, makers of small-wheeled bicycles — perhaps because the bikes' unconventional designs could make them tricky to ride. It was gallows humour. And although Papadopoulos was making progress in the mathematics of bikes, he only published one paper related to the topic as a first author 4.

Without money or publications, his time in bicycle research wound down. In , he put his bikes into a moving van and drove west to Illinois, where his then-wife had a job. He endured a succession of teaching and industry jobs that he hated. In his spare time, he founded and moderated the Hardcore Bicycle Science e-mail list for bicycle-science nerds and helped to build a car that fitted into a few suitcases for the reality television show Junkyard Wars.

In , David Wilson, an MIT engineer and inventor of one of the first modern recumbent bicycles, invited Papadopoulos to co-author the third edition of the book Bicycling Science.

Papadopoulos was overwhelmed by monetary debts and responsibilities. He failed to send Wilson the first chapter, and then stopped responding to e-mails altogether. Wilson felt betrayed. Papadopoulos says that he did complete the work, but that it took two years longer than it should have, partly because of a stressful divorce. Mobile Newsletter banner close.

Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. Outdoor Activities. How Bicycles Work. See more extreme sports pictures. Bicycle Parts In order to talk about bicycles, it's good to start by naming all of the parts.

Here's a picture of a typical bicycle: Bicycle Image Gallery Bicycles were first introduced in 19th-century Europe. See more bicycle pictures. Each tube has a name, as shown here: The front fork is the movable part of the frame that holds the front wheel. The wheels - The wheels are made of a hub, the spokes, the metal rim and the rubber tire.

The seat and seat post The handlebars and the handlebar stem that connects the handlebars to the frame The cranks and the pedals The brakes , consisting of the actuators on the handlebars, the brake cable, the brake calipers and the brake pads The chain and gears , consisting of the front chain wheels, the rear freewheel, the front and rear derailleur, the shift levers on the handlebars and the cables That is all there is to a bicycle! Bicycle Bearings Bicycles use ball bearings to reduce friction.

You can find ball bearings in: The front and rear hubs for the wheels The bottom bracket , where an axle connects the two pedal cranks together The fork tube , where the handlebars are allowed to turn The pedals The freewheel , where they do double-duty In the freewheel, they also help provide the one-directional feature.

The bearings in the fork tube are typical and are shown in the following figure: The ball bearings yellow ride in a cup red. Bicycle Gears You have probably seen a picture of the funny-looking "penny-farthing" or "high-wheeler" bicycles -- the ones with a huge front wheel and a tiny rear wheel. Bicycle Gear Ratios The idea behind multiple gears on a bicycle -- whether it's an older "speed" bike or a modern mountain bike with 24 gears -- is to let you change the distance that the bike moves forward with each pedal stroke.

The "lowest" gear ratio on the bike might be a front chain wheel with 22 teeth and a rear gear having 30 teeth.

That means that the gear ratio is 0. For each pedal stroke, the rear wheel turns 0. In other words, for each pedal stroke, the bike moves forward about 60 inches about 3.

The "highest" gear ratio on the bike might be a front chain wheel with 44 teeth and a rear gear having 11 teeth. An award-winning team of journalists, designers, and videographers who tell brand stories through Fast Company's distinctive lens.

The future of innovation and technology in government for the greater good. Leaders who are shaping the future of business in creative ways. New workplaces, new food sources, new medicine--even an entirely new economic system. But perhaps a bigger surprise is that no consensus exists on why the bike is as stable as it is. For such a simple design, which almost anyone can understand, this seems crazy. After all, we live in a world of self-driving cars and safe passenger airplanes.

If you push a riderless bicycle, it balances itself, steering automatically to correct for any wobbles, until it slows down and finally falls flat on its side. There are two theories as to how the bike keeps itself upright. One is the gyroscopic theory, where the spinning wheel provides enough stability to stop the bike from falling. You can try this for yourself if you have a bike handy.