Treadmill Measurements

16 April 2007 by Arend

In order to examine whether it is possible to carry out experiments on a treadmill we carried out a number of experiments on the big VU Treadmill to see if a bicycle handels the same on a treadmill as on the road.

Today we put the instrumented bicycle from Jodi' MSc work on the big (3 x 5m) VU treadmill. We feel more confident about the usage of this treadmill for our bicycle handling experiments if the instrumented bicycle on the treadmill shows the same lateral dynamic behaviour as on the road. It turned out to be rather tricky to launch the bicycle and catch it in the fall. Jodi got really handy by first launching it from standing aside and then stepping to the rear where he could steer, perturb and catch it. The weave speed  of the bicycle on the road is 4.0 m/s (14.4 km/h) [The bicycle is laterally unstable below the weave speed and stable above]. The preliminary result is that the bicycle shows approximately the same weave speed on the treadmill, as you can see from the three videos below:

12 km/h: Unstable (wmv 5.8 Mb)

 

16 km/h: Stable (wmv 9.4 Mb)

 

30 km/h: Very Stable (wmv 6.5 Mb)