Late on a Monday evening i recieved a phone call from a friend at work. David is a man who seems to have experienced most things. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if he had lived three lives all at the same time. He proposed that we enter The Bellringer Regenerative Braking Challenge as part of the Bath Fringe Festival 2006.
The main idea of the regenerative braking challenge is to carry a full barrel of beer from the Abbey Ales brewery at the top of a well known Bath hill, down the 400m busy main road into the centre of town and to an excellent little pub called The Old Green Tree. The full barrel of beer is then replaced with an empty barrel which is propelled back up to the top of the hill again. Sounds pretty simple huh?
After a little discussion on the Tuesday of last week, we decided to enter the challenge and proceeded to find as much useful equipment as we could for the challenge. Now Dave just happened to have eight spare wheels in his back garden, along with a metal bed frame which we decided would probably the best frame for the contraption.
The principle behind the regenerative braking challenge is to use the weight on the way down a hill to store up the energy within a vehicle of some kind (in modern electric cars this is used, in part, to charge up the battery). This energy can then be used to power the vehicle back up the hill. After some thought around the initial idea from Dave, there were some interesting inputs from the rest of the team including Nigel’s thoughts about using two drums of varying sizes to create tension whilst going down the hill and then releasing it back up the hill. This idea is the one we went with and seemed to be the best choice!
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Let me introduce you to exhibit A on the right here. After a few long evenings of extremely hard work and pure genius, this is the contraption we used to enter the regenerative braking challenge. We called it ‘The Tedcicle’, aptly named after the founder of the company we work for. Please click through to the photo’s location and take a look at some of the notes that have been added.
On friday, the day of the comptition, a few of us left early and headed to where the Tedcicle had been beautifully crafted and labouriously created. We headed on over to the event in anticipation of an extremely large crowd to welcome us hither. Although the back of the pub seemed a little deserted we hung around for a little while and waited patiently whilst the organisers arrived, albeit with a little telephone reminder! After a little while it became clear that there were only limited participants, and in fact we were the only team who decided to enter this years competition.
After a quick test, with unreassuring results, we were ready to go. Unloading and re-loading the eleastic with a little more tension to begin with gave us the little extra confidence we needed. We were on the starting blocks and ready to go with a beer barrel firmly attached to the centre of the contraption.
It all started well, easing off of the start line and down the slight incline towards the main road. A few little problems with the lack of steering caused a few stops, twists and then restarts from the same position. We were on track for something grand…
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Ok, so we never made it onto the main road. What happened next was pretty much the largest surprise of the entire event. Unfortunately it seemed that our pre-tensioning of the wound elastic caused a little over tightening whilst the elastic wound onto the larger wheel. This in turn completely destroyed the back wheel due to the huge amount of force which was acting upon it. Constructing the drums from fabricated wooden parts seemed to be the downfall of the entire event.
So we hitched a ride down to The Old Green Tree, Tedcicle and all… and proceeded to enjoy the excellent sandwiches and marvellous real ales and cider to be found there. The catering staff at work could sure learn a thing or two from these guys!
Even though the back wheel completely buckled, the event will go down in history as a truely memorable moment. The team worked excellently together and the hard work and ingenious ideas leading up to the event are sure worth a mention. So thanks to Dave, Nigel, Ian, Matt along with a little consultation from Pete and support from Simon. Thanks for all of the support from everyone at work too! Let’s give it another shot next year!
And finally, does anyone have any suggestions of what to do with 100m of 8mm thick elastic?
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Links:
The Walcot University Write-up - Notes from the Bellringer Regenerative Braking Challenge
Regenerative Braking on Wikipedia
