Special Topics in Sports Engineering

Course dates: July 1 to July 12, 2024

For students from collaborating Universities doing a Master's in a related subject

Course contents

Special Topics in Sports Engineering is an inter-university course for Master students in Mechanical Engineering, Movement Sciences, Sport Sciences and other related MSc programmes. The course is organised as a two-week intensive course, and comprises lectures, demonstrations, practicals, hands-on research and a final test.

The course “Special Topics in Sports Engineering” is meant for MSc students with backgrounds in (bio)mechanical engineering, sports sciences, movement sciences, or related subjects. The course aims at offering new knowledge and the synthesis of existing knowledge to solve a sports engineering problem: the quantification of human performance through understanding of the interaction of human and machine. This general skill is applied to cycling.

The course consists of lectures, practicals and brief group assignments. Students will work in small (up to four students) interdisciplinary groups. The course's final activity will be a test ride to quantify the differences between actual performance and predicted performance.

In this course, students will have to answer the question:

Given a particular bike, what will be your own predicted time over a given distance and track and how well does this match reality?

For an impression of the final tests in 2017-2018 see this video:

Aims of the course:

At the end of this course students should:

-          Understand and be able to reproduce the power equation for cycling

-          Understand the basic principles behind air resistance and rolling resistance

-          Understand the concept of metabolic power and its relationship to physiological exercise parameters like heart rate and oxygen consumption

-          Be able to program a calculation tool for the prediction of performance, based on the power equation

-          Be able to estimate individual (metabolic) peak power production, based on simple (field)-tests and scientific information

-          Be able to estimate individual air resistance for a chosen human-propelled vehicle, based on simple (field)-tests and scientific information

-          Be able to estimate individual rolling resistance for a chosen human-propelled vehicle, based on simple (field)-tests and scientific information

-          Be able to quantify the effect of different seating positions for a chosen human-propelled vehicle, based on simple (field)-tests and scientific information

-          Be familiar with the biomechanics of cycling and the state-of-the-art in musculoskeletal modeling of cycling

-          Be familiar with human thermoregulation in sports

-          Be familiar with “material doping”, or the role of engineering in maximizing sports performance

-          Be familiar with design concepts in bicycle construction

-          Be able to work in an international, interdisciplinary group

-          Be able to integrate acquired knowledge in brief reports or vlogs   

Course size: 3EC

Entry requirements: be available for the first two weeks in July, basic Matlab / Python skills, prepared to work in groups

 


This course is taught in block format: as a two-week intensive inter-university course