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Initially I thought this was some kind of mechanical regenerative braking. I wonder if that's been attempted before. Applying the brakes would wind a spring a
by Evidlo 6y ago
Initially I thought this was some kind of mechanical regenerative braking. I wonder if that's been attempted before.
Applying the brakes would wind a spring and bring the bike to a stop. Then applying force to the pedals or manually pulling a lever would release the spring for an assisted start.
Edit: Here's some mechanical regenerative braking projects:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yK7fyugbe6o https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yK7fyugbe6o
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DoaJK39Tl60 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DoaJK39Tl60
Electrical regen is probably cheaper and lighter.
- itronitron 6y agoThat was my expectation from the title as well. I thought it would look like an over-sized mainspring from a watch (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainspring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainspring). There was a small company back in the 90's or 00's that was developing very high rpm flywheels to store energy but they weren't able to work out a licensing deal with the car manufacturers.
- londons_explore 6y agoSpring regen is hard because you need a very big Spring to store the energy of 80kg of bike at 30mph.
- mleonhard 6y agoMaybe air compression would work better?
- ACAVJW4H 6y agoTom stanton a great youtuber builds and tests prototypes like these. Here he tried electrical regen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suxSqrP_X4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suxSqrP_X4
- zero_deg_kevin 6y agoI always thought the F1 kinetic energy recovery systems (KERS) were a pretty neat mechanical solution. Probably way too heavy for bikes & low-torque humans, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_recovery_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_recovery_system