bottpower.com

Some days ago I received an email from a group of students from the Engineering University of Sevilla (Sevilla is a city located in the South of Spain). They said they were going to participate in “Motostudent”, an engineering competition I was completely unaware, and that I founded very interesting.

Motostudent is promoted by the Moto Engineering Fundation. This fundation is formed by several organizations like Dorna Sports or ANESDOR (which is the Asociation of Spanish motorbikes manufacturers).

Motostudent is an international competition for engineering students teams. They must design and build a 125 cc. road racing motorbike.

The competition has several stages (design, safety tests, dynamic tests, etc). Those teams able to pass the different tests will participate on a race. The riders will be selected by the organization among federated riders from junior championships.

The organization will provide the engine, brakes, suspensions, wheels, and probably the ECU. Students must design and build the rest of the bike: chassis, subframe, airbox, bodywork, etc.

In the car world this kind of competition exists from 1982, when the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) created the Formula SAE. This idea was a big success and since then the number of competitors has been increasing year by year, so that curretly there is a championship, the “Formula SAE Series”, that has 8 races among USA, Great Britain, Italy, Australia and Brasil.

As it occurs in Formula SAE, in Motostudent students must look for their own sponsors and technical partners. Students can look for technical advice both among teachers from their university or among professional engineers, etc.

I wish there was a competition as Motostudent when I was a student. Anyway it is never too late, in their email the Sevilla Team asked me if I would like to contribute in their project as external consultant, and of course I accepted without doubt. I am sure that it is going to be a very interesting experience for both parts!

Tags: motostudent

With this post I’m going to start a new category in the blog, dedicated to innovative ideas (or crazy ideas for a ot of people).

If I told you that I had an idea based on using the exhaust gasses to heat up the rear tyre of a racing motorbike, most of you would think that this is a crazy idea.

However, those of you who follow F1, probably already know that last weekend, in the Chinese GP, the Renaults had a device to deflect part of the exhaust gasses to the rear tyres. The idea is to avoid the tyres been cooled by airflow, in this way tyres can work with a more constant temperature. I am convinced that this is an idea that a lot of people has thought about before, because it is something pretty evident.

Same concept could be applied to motorbikes. You all know that motogp will have a single tyre supplier next season. Next year riders will have much less possibilities to choose (less tyres per race, less compounds and less carcass types), so that tyres choice will be much more critical than in current season (here you can read more detailed information about this subject).

Current tyres are very sensitive to ambient and asphalt temperature, and this factor can give rise to mistakes in race tyres chooice. Exhaust gases could be used to control the tyres working temperature, so that it would be possible to reduce mistake possibilites in race tyre choice.

Sounds crazy? It seems that Renault guys doesn’t think the same..

By the way, I wonder if Robin Tuluie, designer of the Tularis, and director of Renault F1 R&D department since January 2004, has been involved in this subject.

Via F1-Technical.

Tags: ideas, F1, exhaust gasses, tyres, motogp

Kar Lee is a graphic designer who lives in England. He works as a freelance for several magazines, and mainly for Performance bikes. I was interested in his work after seeing one of his creations, a street legal Britten V1000.

This is what he thinks about his work: “All my concepts are the works of a frustrated imagination, one that would like the big motorcycle manufacturers to deliver the bikes that I really want to see on the road, rather than the predictable, and sometimes overcooked update of what we’re given. I like my creations to look like they could really be next years new model, and most use existing technology.
These are bikes that could be built tomorrow, but for one reason or another are unlikely to become a reality. I like to ask “What if…”

For example, how it would look a nowadays Yamaha RD 500?

A Honda CX 750 Turbo?

And a Yamaha R8, based on the MotoGP bike?

In Kar Lee website you will find much more of his creations, like a Suzuki RF1000, or a Kawa GPZ10R, or a…

Tags: Kar Lee, Britten, RD 500

Last weekend I was in Albacete track, in the 4th round of the Spanish Championship. Supersport and Formula Extreme categories have very restrictive rules, so 125 is the only one category where it is possible to find something a little bit more interesting from a technical point of view.

Last season an english kid, Jess Trayler, atracted my attention, he was riding a Seel 125. Currently Joey Litjens, a rider of the dutch team Abbink Bos Racing, finished 10th in the first race of the season in Valencia, and won the second race in Barcelona, riding under the rain.

I was very curious about the Seel bikes, so last saturday night I went to the box of the Abbink Bos Racing team and I took some photos of the bikes. I also talked a little bit with Jörg Seel, the father of these bikes and son of the Seel company founder. Seel is a german company which makes racing special parts.

The Seel 125 uses a Honda RS 125 as a starting point. They have a special kit which is the whole engine, with a very compact crankshaft and the two crankcase covers (the one of the dry clutch and the one of the water pump) CNC machined from an aluminum block.
Regarding the chassis, the most interesting thing is that they modified the headstock area, allowing the airbox conduit going through it.

The bikes have an impeccable look. Seel doesn’t use any “revolutionary” technical solution, what they do (like other special parts manufacturers like JHA) is to evolve and improve the Honda standard material, creating new parts with increased performance.

In the Albacete race they weren’t lucky, Joey crashed in the first trainings and he had some injuries in one leg. Sunday he couldn’t finish the race.

If you click over the photos you will see it with bigger size, in the bottpower flickr gallery.

Tags: seel 125, 125 gp, special parts, spanish championship

Some days ago, Stoner and Melandri tested a Ducati GP9 prototype, the new weapon that Ducati is developing for 2009 MotoGP World Championship.
The most interesting feature of this prototype is its new carbon fiber chassis. In principle it may seem odd that Ducati engineers have decided to build the chassis of their new bike using carbon fiber. Obviously, any Motogp fabric wouldn’t change the material of their chassis, moving from steel to carbon fiber without having very precise reasons to do it.

The Ducati chassis is a small structure created to join the headstock to the engine. In such a small structure, the structural efficiency (the relationship between stiffness and weight) that is possible to achieve is very similar independently of the used material (steel, aluminum or carbon fiber). In my opinion the reason behind this material change is neither related with stiffness nor with a weight reduction.

During the last years we have seen that the engineering departments have been playing with the stiffness value of their chassis and swingarms. Current trend is to design structural parts to allow certain deformation when the bike is inclined, in this way the chassis absorbs part of the energy generated when the bike goes over bumps, because in this situation of maximum lean angle the suspensions can not work properly. We could say that engineers want the chassis to work as a second suspension system when the bike is at full inclination. But this idea has a problem because we all know that a good suspension system needs two elements, one beeing elastic and another one with damping properties. In a normal suspension the elasting element is the spring and the damping element is the hydraulic system. If we want our chassis to act as a secondary suspension system, we can use the chassis as an elastic element, but we also  need a damping element to dissipate the energy in order to minimize the oscillations.

In current chassis, this damping element almost doesn’t exist, and this is one the sources of one of the biggest problems that technicians can find in nowadays racing motorbikes: chattering. I said that the damping element “almost” doesn’t exist because every material has some damping, called “intrinsic” or “passive” damping. If we compare the intrinsic damping of aluminum, steel and carbon fiber, we will find that aluminum has the smallest intrinsic damping. Steel (which is the material that Ducati has been using till now in their chassis) has an intrinsic damping bigger than aluminum. And finally, carbon fiber has an intrinsic damping greater than steel. Saying it with other words, carbon fiber is a material that has a natural tendency to damp vibrations.

Moreover, a carbon fiber chassis gives to the designer more possibilities to improve even more its damping characteristics. The own nature of the chassis, built using fiber layers, allows to insert other materials between the layers. For example “viscoelastic materials”, which are materials that have both elastic and viscous properties when are deformed, presenting a great vibration damping capacity.

At the beginning of the eighties the chassis weren’t stiff enough and during some years designers were looking to increase stiffness. In a few years they arrived to a point in which the chassis were too much stiff. Then the objective was to find the optimum stiffness values. Currently we are going into a new stage in which dynamic factors are playing a more important role (stiffness is a static concept).

If you are interested in this subject, here you have some interesting texts to read:

In chapter 6 of the book “Motorcycle handling and chassis design” by Tony Foale, you will find a detailed explanation about why it is more necessary to increase lateral damping than lateral deflection in the chassis.

Here you have an interesting link to an article that compares in a very simple way damping properties of steel, aluminum and carbon fiber.

Finally, in latest issue (#25) of Cycle News magazine, you will find a very interesting article about the Ducati GP9, written by Neal Spalding. He analizes other aspects of this motorbike, as well as the damping factor I have commented in this post. 

Tags: ducati gp9, damping, carbon fiber, chassis, viscoelastic materials, chattering

I never installed a videogame in my computer (except a very simple chess game), and I never owned a video console, so I don’t have any experience in this field.
Till now the only practical application of videogames into motorbike racing that I knew is the fact that some riders use to play with a video game console to have a first impression of those tracks they never have ridden before.
Some days ago I discovered a second, and surprising, possibility of some nowadays videogames.
I was searching for information about MOTEC engine management and data adquisition systems that can be used in cars or motorbikes, when I saw that there were more than 400.000 references in Google, most of them refered to videogames. After some clicks more I realized that there are some car “videogames” (probably it is better to call them simulators), that are able to generate files with “telemetry” data of the car behaviour in the game.
The simulator generates data files in the same way that a real telemetry system, with channels like suspensions, tyre temperatures, speeds, throttle, rpm, etc.
The most interesting thing is that you can go to the MOTEC official webpage and download their proffesional data interpretation software, and use it to analize your virtual car behaviour exactly in the same way that a proffesional telemetrist analizes the data of his real racing car. This kind of software provides a lot of analysis possibilites, and you have even the possibility of exporting the data to very powerful analysis tools like MATLAB.
This simulator is called GTR2 and it is the most real racing car simulator that you can find nowadays in the videogames market.

This kind of simulators is based in very complex numeric simulations of phisical models. GRT2 takes into account a lot of variables like climatic conditions, tyres wear, or even the changes in the car behaviour as long as the fueltank is beeing empty. It is possible to adjust a lot of the parameters (tyres pressure, each suspension in an independent way, etc), and check through the telemetry how every change affects the car handling. From a technical training point of veiw, I think it is something really interesting, with a lot of possibilities.

By the moment I think that there is not avaliable a motorbike simulator with this quality and these telemetry features. I hope that something will appear soon.. for sure that it will be the first videogame that I will install in my computer!

Tags: simulation, videogames, telemetry, motec, gtr2

Last week I was at the Dunlop tests in Almeria and Albacete (South of Spain) circuits. Every year, at the beginning of the season, Dunlop organizes this kind of tests to allow their racing teams to know and test the new tyres that Dunlop creates every year. There were several teams of the Spanish Championship (from Formula Extreme and Supersport classes) and also some European teams plus some World Endurance Teams like Yamaha Austria or Yamaha Phase One. For me it was my first contact with the team I’m going to work with in 2008 as telemetrist, the Kawasaki PL Racing, that this year will race in theh Spanish Championship, in Formula Extreme with riders Victor Carrasco and Julian Mazuecos and in Supersport with Jonathan Alabarce.

I saw a lot of motorbikes in Almería, but there was one that catched my attention: the METISS.

I think this was the first time I have seen a FFE (funny front end) motorbike running on a track on live. I didn’t had too much free time to watch the bike on the track, but I found some time to visit their box, take some photos and chat with Emmanuel Cheron (one of the riders) and Jean Bertrand Bruneau, the bike’s designer, a dentist who has been designing and building FFE bikes for 20 years. Some examples are the Atomo (the link only works with the French version), after that the “JBB” prototype and now the METISS.

Currently the French team is racing the WEC (World Endurance Championship) with great resoults (they were 8th in the last Bol d’Or). Endurance is one of the last championships that allow prototypes (at least here in Europe).

The METISS team had two motorbikes in Almería. One unit was the model they used in 2007:

The other one, was the new bike they built for 2008:

As you can see in the photos, the bike has a front swingarm, and a big selfventilated front brake disc with a huge AP Racing brake caliper.

Donor bikes are Suzuki GSXR, they kept even the original chassis, which is properly modified in the headstock area to adapt the special front end designed by Jean Bertrand Bruneau.

To keep the original chassis has it’s pros and cons. The main advantage is that it makes easier, faster and cheaper to build a new bike. This allows the team to update their bikes every season. If they had to design and build a completely new bike, it would be very difficult for them to be able to be training at the beginning of the season with the new bike, like they were doing in Almería.

The disadvantage is that using the Suzuki original chassis means that they are not taking profit of the weight reduction that this front end allows. For example, some years ago, when they built the Atomo, they used the engine as main structural element: they built a motorbike without chassis. To do it, they had to mill new crankcases that included the housings for the front end mounting points. That meant time and money.
I found comforting to see that there are still persons like Jean Bertrand Bruneau and his team, that design and build their own motorbikes, with their own ideas. People capable of racing those motorbikes and beat a lot of conventional ones, designed by powerful multinationals.

During 2008 I will keep an eye to the METISS resoults in the WEC.

You can see these photos in a bigger size in the bottpower flickr gallery.

Tags: metiss, prototype, FFE, funny front end, endurance, almeria

Lately I am spending some spare time designing a tool that will allow me to measure chassis and swingarm stiffness. My intention is to design something relatively simple and cheap, but that will allow me to obtain precise data. The images that you can see below are just sketches, the final design will be probably quite different.
First image shows an arrangement to measure the chassis stiffness regarding torsion. The chassis is clamped in the swingarm pivot area, and a torque is applied around the steering head. The torque value is adjusted in a precise way adding steel discs (blue color in the drawing). A digital inclinometer will be placed over the lever arm to measure the torsion angle.
In order to measure the chassis stiffness with the engine assembled on it, it is possible to locate the green clamping parts in the external faces of the chassis.

Second image shows an arrangement to measure the lateral stiffness of the chassis (flexion). In this case we just pull from the steering head, hanging a weight that is converted in lateral force through a pulley. Here it would be necessary to put an object under the chassis to avoid it to fall over the table (rotating over the swingarm pivot).

Third image shows an arrangement to measure the swingarm torsional stiffness. The arrangement to measure lateral stiffness would be similar to the one used for the chassis, using the same pulley.
I also want to use this tool to measure transversal torsional stiffness of the chassis, I mean, the stiffness that it has when we apply a load similar to the one that appears when we use the front brake.

I think that it is impossible to build a tool that could give you absolut stiffness values, the objective is to build a device to achieve values that will allow me to compare different chassis.

I want to use this table also to meassure chassis (general dimmensions, geometry, etc) and also to build chassis, using it as a base for my jigs.

Regarding stiffness meassurement, appart of general meassurement, I want to use extensometry to meassure local deformations on the chassis, in this way it will be possible to know the influence of each area of the chassis in the stiffness of the whole chassis. This could be very useful to validate and improve FEA models, trying to make these models more similar to reality.
I will keep you informed of this project progress in the blog.

Tags: bottpower, other projects, chassis, swingarm, stiffness, tool, extensometry, FEA

Some days ago, reviewing the last posts of The kneeslider, I arrived to 95Racer’s blog, and I found a project with a very interesting approach, and moreover, very well carried out by 3Up-Racing, a group of people who have been involved in club racing in the UK for many years.

Lately a lot of people is talking about the new course of current 250 GP category. The only thing we know for sure is that the new category will use 4 strokes engines. 3Up-racing planned to design and build a 4 strokes motorbike, with a performance level similar to a 250 cc. 2 strokes GP motorbike. They chose “95Racer” as a name for the bike because they wanted to build a bike with a dry weight of 95 kg. and 95 HP at rear wheel.

After analizing several possibilities, they chose a Kawasaki ER-6 650 cc. paralel twin. They designed and build a steel trellis frame. The design of the swingarm is very interesting, they made an aluminum tubular structure, and after that they covered it with aluminum sheetmetal. The front suspension comes from a Yamaha R6, and the bodywork from a Honda RS-250RW Speedfiber kit.

As you can see in the photo, they also built their own carbon fiber airbox, with a single central intake that goes through the headstock.

In their blog you will find very interesting stuff, for example they removed the start engine, it allowed them to reduce the battery size and weight. They created an external starter that acts directly on the engine’s crank. With these modifications, they saved arround 10 kilos..
You can see it in the following video and, by the way, enjoy the sound…

Photos and vídeo: copyright 3Up-Racing.

Tags: 95Racer, prototype, 3up-racing, ER-6

This is the first post of the year, and even beeing a little bit late, I want to wish you a happy 2008, full of dreams and projects.
As almost everybody, at the beginning of every year I like to review what I did during the previous one and at the same time, I like to make new purposes for the new year. Personally, and regarding motorbikes, 2007 has been a very exciting year for me.

During 2007 I worked for the very first time in a racing team, in the road racing Spanish Championship, in the Formula Extreme category. I worked as a telemetrist. Thanks to this job I learnt some things about motorbikes setup, data adquisition and also about how a racing team works. The experience has been very positive and it allowed me to increase my know-how. I really wanted a lot to acquire some real experience in the racing world, so I am very happy in this aspect.

This had also a negative side, as I didn’t had almost free time, because I combined racing with my normal job as engineer in a medical X-ray systems company, and it meant that I couldn’t dedicate time to work on the Morlaco project.

During 2007 motorbikes gave me another great satisfaction, because I raced my first road race, as a rider. The best of all was that my team mate was Tony Foale, one of my “heros” and favourite motorbike designers, together with Antonio Cobas, John Britten and Claude Fior.
15 years ago I raced in several motoX races with a Yamaha YZ 250, but I didn’t have experience on a road track, so last December I did something a little mad asI went to race without any previous experience! 
The race was the last one of the season, of a Spanish aficionados championship called MAC90. It was in the Cartagena circuit. The bike was Tony’s Suzuki SV 650. Thank you Tony!. I don’t know the laptimes I did, for sure I was the slowest by far, anyway it was an amazing experience that made me realize again about how much I love motorcycling.

Also, during 2007 I decided to change the bottpower website and create this blog, which is something I find very stimulating because it allows me to share my ideas with other people with similar interests as mine.

Regarding 2008, I think it is very likely that I work again in the Spanish Championship. I also would like to train and prepare myself as a trackday rider, and try to race the whole MAC90 championship (in 2008 it will have 4 races).
I also would like to find time to finish the Morlaco, right now that is my unresolved matter.
And of course, I want to continue writing in this blog at regular intervals.
So, that’s it.. let’s go for 2008!  

Tags: 2007, 2008, racing, telemetry