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Road bike comfort: on the measurement of vibrations induced to cyclist

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Abstract

With ride quality being one of the most sought-after characteristics of a road bicycle by customers as well as by bicycle manufacturers, the vibrational behaviour of the bicycle/cyclist system has grown into an active field in sport engineering research in recent years. When assessing bicycle transmissibility and ride comfort, it is important to control test conditions to obtain repeatable load and acceleration measurements at the cyclist’s contact points with the bicycle. Surprisingly, however, this consideration has not yet been specifically addressed in the literature. The aim of this paper is a first effort to investigate the effect of a selected set of test conditions on the measurement of vibration induced to the cyclist by a road bicycle. Our results showed that all the test conditions selected had a significant effect on the level of vibration induced to the cyclist.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) and the participation of Cervélo and Vroomen-White Design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. VélUS Research Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Université de Sherbrooke, 2500 boul. de l’Université, Sherbrooke, QC, J1K 2R1, Canada

    Julien Lépine, Yvan Champoux & Jean-Marc Drouet

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  1. Julien Lépine
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  2. Yvan Champoux
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  3. Jean-Marc Drouet
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Correspondence to Julien Lépine.

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Lépine, J., Champoux, Y. & Drouet, JM. Road bike comfort: on the measurement of vibrations induced to cyclist. Sports Eng 17, 113–122 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12283-013-0145-8

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