This new year is going to be full of initiatives, improvements and lots of work for us to do.
To start off our news: we have a new project named Handbike, born from the meeting of Policumbent and Eaton, one of the biggest global company in the engineering field and promoter of the Italian Handbike Run, a para cycling tournament opened in 2009.
As many of you already know, an handbike is a special kind of bicycle where the wheels are hand-actioned by the cyclist.
After a couple of meetings between our team and Eaton, it was soon obvious that both wanted to build a record-achieving Handbike.
The goal is the male world-record, held by Ken Talbot, member of the ULV team from the Liverpool’s University, who achieved 82,9 km/h (51.58 mph).
We are happy to announce you that our work is almost finished and is full of initiatives and innovations.
Some of them concern the aerodynamic profile. CFD simulations are telling us that the changes we made should grant a power loss reduction of about 18-20% compared with Taurus.
We are also happy to announce that molds have already been made and the building of the shell is about to start.
More news regard the new framework. Here we can only reveal that it won’t be made of composite sandwich panels as on TAURUS and TAURUS-X.
We will also have a new shifting gear cassette, smaller and lighter.
Our final important innovation will be done on the vision system.
Our goal was to higher our electronic system fault tolerance.
For those unwelcome with this term: the higher the fault tolerance is, the lower is the chance of having a complete breakdown of the vision system because of the malfunctioning of some components.
With that in mind, the vision system will be transformed in a full analogic one, based on fpv cameras, which will decrease the number of cables needed for the transmission and acquisition of the video and the possibility of detachment of microweldings. This aspect becomes fundamental if you think that, without the vision system, the athlete is completely blind and a malfunctioning may cause an accident.
Beyond having a more efficient system, we will try to better position our new cameras by closing them off in an external case, sealing them.
This changes will lower the image’s ping, which will help the athlete’s experience inside the vehicle and also will allow us to use less batteries for the functioning of the system, thanks to a lower need of calculus for the decoding of the signal.
With this method we also lower the vehicle’s load and we gain a faster start of the machine. This will lower the chance of having problems at the start of the run.
