January 25th, 2006
0 to 60 in 5 Seconds: On a Bicycle
By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
As a longtime scooter rider, I can tell you a bit about about bike snobbery. Harley riders do that cool hand signal when they pass each other, but when I come scooting along, let’s just say, I’m glad helmets have face covers so I can be spared the inevitable sneer. “Wimp!” Of course, any rider will tell you that the smaller the two wheeled vehicle, the more dangerous - making the bicycle the champ in terms of overall risk. You can’t accelerate out of harm’s way like you can on a motorized bike, and your bike is usually as light as a feather - meaning instant crumple when you crash. So hats off to this guy - 0 to 60 in 5 seconds…on a bike.
Pickens got himself another bike and stepped it up, attaching a 200-pound-thrust engine capable of blasting him from 0 to 60 miles an hour in five seconds — fast enough to beat a Porsche in a drag race. The rocket bike employs the same hybrid rocket technology as the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne, whose propulsion system Pickens helped design.
In place of synthetic rubber fuel, however, the bike uses ordinary roofing tar. To ignite it, Pickens placed a model-rocket motor inside the engine. A button on the handlebar fires the model-rocket motor, which in turn sets off Pickens’s larger motor by lighting the roofing-tar fuel. Source: CNN
Mighk Wilson says:
Bicyclists are NOT at greater risk than motorcyclists. Motorcycling is far deadlier, with 8.8 deaths per million hours of activity, while bicyclists experience only 0.26 deaths per million hours. These numbers were worked up by an independent risk management company in 1993.
January 26th, 2006 at 6:10 am
Mikey says:
Alice, I believe Mythbusters might have given this guy a heads up (with the engineering aspect) when they built a much larger rocket last year. They were trying to validate a myth that the modern solid-fueled rocket may have been invented by a Civil war officer who used available engineering and equipment to produce a missle (with warhead) that -could- have been a true wartime weapon of mass destruction.
The Mythbusters crew changed the myth’s description slightly. When they found that liquid oxygen would have been impossible to obtain using then available equipment, they went with an oxidizer that they thought was available: liquid Nitrous Oxide. This allowed them to produce an oxidizer in liquid form, and it also did not require the extreme pressure needed to keep the gas in liquid form. (N02 will compress to liquid at much lower pressures than LOX, pounds of PSI instead of hundreds of PSI)
For fuel, the Mythbusters used Paraffin wax (inside the rocket’s motor). A large hollow cylinder of Paraffin, inside the steel pipe that is the rocket’s body.
The other significant thing was the rocket’s thrust chamber, and it was made of the one thing available back then that could withstand the intense heat of the burn. Graphite. A large cube of graphite was shaped in a turning lathe to an internal hollow shape that -is- what rocket motors look like on the inside, in inverted bowl shape with a small perfectly positioned fuel inlet at the top and a wide conical exhaust at the bottom.
It worked so well that they nearly burnt down the shop.
They were somewhat taken aback by the power of the burn, they hadn’t expected a strong burn for the first test, and no one did the basic math of how much energy they were getting ready to release. Eyebrows did get singed.
January 26th, 2006 at 6:32 am
Perros says:
This guy designed the rocket for SpaceShipOne… not sure how much of a ‘heads-up’ he needs :-p
-Perros-
January 27th, 2006 at 12:41 am
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