Bicycle wheel life
The Science Channel had a showing of the making of the giant Ferris wheels around the world and over the last 100 plus years. Interesting stuff to say the least, what I found that peaked my interest was the comparison of Ferris wheels to bicycle wheels. I really do not think it was a good comparison as they were showing that the design of a bicycle wheel was not strong enough for a Ferris wheel.... Duh!
That is what brought me to this thread in the forums, this particular thread seems to be what I was looking for and I did a look up about wheel stresses and lifetimes. Here is the study that was done in 1993 or there abouts....
http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/papers/HPGavin-Wheel-Paper.pdf
Boiling this all down it seems the study of bicycle wheels and not Ferris wheels, showed that bike wheels should give close to a million cycles or more of life time. I am sure with proper maintenance this can be greatly extended!
Here is a statement from the study.....
"The fatigue resistance of the spokes, the spoke diameter, the arrangement of the spokes, and the
stiffness of the rim influence wheel stiffness and fatigue life. Wheels with 2X, 3X, and 4X spoke
patterns all have similar spoke strains when subjected to radial loads. The fatigue resistance of spoked
wheels to steady cycling loads is very high for most typical service conditions."
I would presume that "trials" bike are out of the loop! :eekster:
poikaa
