Superwheel - a revelation or a con

LarryOz

LarryOz

Cruzeum Curator & Sigma Wrangler
DavidCH said:
Is it baloney or legit?
Click to expand...
Seems smelly to me - but time and true testing should prove that.

I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but my simplistic view of this is that: any motion by any object uses power from something for its movement. So where is the power to compress the spring come from? Even if the spring bounces back some of that energy is used up within itself (however small), and heat (however small) is probably being created as the by product.

I would more easily believe a setup that used magnets somehow - at least with them there is this magnetic field that is being used that is not "mechanical" in nature, and could in some way exploit gravity and the magnetic fields within the earth or even a spinning object around a wire (electo-magnetic principals, etc). Lost of people in history have tried to build a perpetual machine or wheels using magnets too. So far nothing. Even if they did they would probably still just rely on something in "nature" to keep it spinning. Even then is not really perpetual.
 
MrSteve

MrSteve

Zen MBB Master
Mostly baloney.
The springs may even-out or compensate for the average pedalers' pedaling technique.
The wheel may make some money for the moneymakers... and fleece the moneygivers.
 
DavidCH

DavidCH

In thought; expanding the paradigm of traversity
If you had a different hub and a flywheel then you could get the kinetic energy from that but this superwheel looks a little lame.
 
DocS

DocS

Guru
It says it uses the rider's weight to generate power... I'm guessing the bouncing motion of the rider's up and down movement... I think it's kind of gimmicky and the added weight might counter against any efficiency increases it might generate...

Blessings,
DocS
 
McWheels

McWheels

Off the long run
If there's compression of the wheel/spokes/hub etc then this can reclaim that and return the power to the wheel, but it won't create any new power the rider didn't already put in, or that gravity gives you going down a hill. So for example any spoke flex or rim deformation is lost energy to us; you'll get almost none of it back. The stiffer one's wheels, the less loss there is. Normal wheels and this wheel both don't get back anything from the tyre.

So I think the comparison should be between a modest non-racing wheel on a city bike and what this does. What it might be is a more efficient wheel than a mediocre one, but not by much. However if you bounce your bike then it might work out as an amusing way to get down the high street.
 
E

ed72

Zen MBB Master
High quality bicycles are over 90% efficient. Maybe recovery of 1% for poor pedaling technique, maybe. Where is the 30% claimed increase in power coming from. I guess they skipped the second law of thermodynamics in his engineering class although there could be a flux capacity in the hub or it could be the special "planing" low trail steel frame used.
 
rfneep

rfneep

Well-Known Member
Oh great. Another perpetual motion machine... Gravity is a conservative force; energy is conserved. No input of energy = no additional motion. It may be that it is designed to move forward if you bounce up and down on the system. But then you are providing energy by working against gravity. Good luck with that being fun to do.

(ps, Doug Burton is right.)
 
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velocio

velocio

Austrian roadside steckerlfisch (fish on a stick)
LarryOz said:
I would more easily believe a setup that used magnets somehow - at least with them there is this magnetic field that is being used that is not "mechanical" in nature, and could in some way exploit gravity and the magnetic fields within the earth ...
Click to expand...

One effort to exploit the Earth's magnetic field to provide a mild rider assist is the ShelBroCo Geomagnetic Booster, which, although ingenious, has not proven to be a commercial success; i.e. https://www.sheldonbrown.com/geomag.html

These "spring powered" Superwheels seems to be extremely similar to an earlier product, the ShelBroCo Powerwheel (which I believe lacks patent protection from imitators). The ShelBroCo Powerwheel appears to have undergone more rigorous engineering development and testing, but far inferior marketing; see https://www.sheldonbrown.com/power-wheel.html

Sometimes I wish I wasn't an engineer, so at least I could benefit from the performance enhancing placebo effect provided by spending money on dubious technology.

Cheers,

-Jack
 
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