Local company doing wind tunnel testing for Cervélo Cycles

[Andrew Meyer]

My next door neighbour works part time at RWDI, a Wind Tunnel Testing company in Guelph that has been doing wind tunnel testing for Cervelo bikes.

Here is an email he sent me about their testing. It's really neat that a local company is so heavily involved in the research and development of high end road bikes.

They even get mentioned in Cervelo's technical papers for the S5 bikes.

If you’re interested in this technical kind of stuff, I’ve attached a couple of pages of RWDI’s latest news letter (see attachment) that explains the  test rig that two of us model shop dudes built for a new client. It’s designed by one of our engineers. Although it doesn’t look very “high tech” with the shrouds on it certainly is, with at least $200,000 of stuff inside. The load cell alone is worth $100k and can measure drag to the gram. Accidentally give it a big jolt and it’s garbage. Two electric motors spin the wheels at various speeds for more real life accuracy. The client was previously sending all of their testing to California but now they’re send us all of that work. Tunnel time can cost $1,000 per hour so the client comes in with about 6 guys for quick configuration changes. They certainly don’t shut down the testing for meals or breaks. They usually bring quite a few bikes for testing.

 

The latest option that they’d asked me to add was a way to put drag on the rear wheel when a human test rider was pedalling the thing. Our engineers devised a plan of using about 15 small very powerful rare earth magnets mounted to an adjustable steel band very close to (but not touching) one of the rig’s aluminum drive wheel. Very cool.

 

As per the attached news letter, one of these bikes can price out from $10,000 to $17,000. I think I’ll keep my old mountain bike that I pulled out of the garbage.

 

The pictures below shows the rig with the shrouds on and off. The rig is fully adjustable for different bike sizes. The blue bike in the pictures is our own bike that we use to test the rig.

Regards
Gary Pootz

 

 

 

 

 

[Chris Pippy]

How can I get in there with my Cervelo P5 for position testing? Hehe :) Great info thanks for sharing!