![]() ![]() ![]() Their work won them the school-wide Senior Design championship.īut what earned the bike real street cred was press coverage from Wired, Gizmodo, Engadget, and a slew of other tech publications. Switching between the two configurations was a mechanical conundrum, and the Alpha team decided to resolve it as part of the Engineering School’s senior design capstone project. ![]() But a single gear makes steep hills challenging, or even dangerous, to climb. Some riders claim that fixies provide extra control, and a better connection to the road. Fixies have surged in popularity in recent years. But the real advance is something close to the bike-messenger’s holy grail: a switch on the handlebars transforms the Alpha from a fixed-gear configuration to free-wheel.Ī fixed-gear bike, or “fixie,” has a single gear and a direct drive train, which means its pedals must always move along with its wheels, and it cannot coast. Sensors throughout the bike pump ride data to an LCD screen on the handlebars. Instead it has an internal belt drive, completely contained within the bike’s frame. You’d have a hard time mistaking it for a Schwinn the Alpha doesn’t have a chain. Hartman, along with Geoff Johnson EAS’11, Katie Savarise EAS’11, Evan Dvorak EAS’11, and Katie Rohacz EAS’11 W’11 have created what they call the Alpha bike. But one group of Penn engineers has gone a few steps further. The timeworn joke is that mechanical engineers are always trying to reinvent the wheel. Anyone from the outside would have thought we were crazy.” As Lucas Hartman EAS’11 recalls, “The wheels moved! Something as simple as that … We were all just sitting there with the biggest smiles on our faces. This is the pay-off of countless all-nighters-a semester’s worth of work. One of the students pushes the pedal and the rest watch in euphoric amazement as the wheels begin to spin. Imagine this: five engineering students huddle around the prototype of a bicycle drive train. Their professor proudly watches the proceedings. ![]()
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