hotbike

https://www.ansys.com/staticassets/AN...-Ply-Cycle.pdf

This just appeared in my "daily feed". It's from Ansys.com.

It is only Two (2) pages, as a pdf. It was originally published in German, but is shown here translated into English.

I hope this will help any Framebuilder who is working on a Carbon Fiber Ladies Bicycle, although the illustration shows a Mens Bike.

Quote:

"....With ANSYS Composite PrepPost, the stiffness and resistance characteristics of fiber-reinforced bicycle components can be optimally adapted to meet design requirements; furthermore, design efficiency is significantly improved. Compared to typical trial-and-error development methods used in the bicycle industry, the number of cost- and time-intensive physical prototypes was greatly reduced."

I don't know what this Ansys Software costs, but with the price of Carbon Fiber, it should be well worth it, given the chance of a failure using trial-and-error methods.

flatlander_48

ANSYS is serious finite element analysis software. It is used to do stress analysis for cars, planes, etc. Unless your name is Trump, Walton or Buffet, I think it is going to be out of your league. The list price for a Pinarello Dogma 2 frame and fork is $5750. I'll bet you may not be in shouting distance of buying an ANSYS license...

hotbike

No, I wouldn't want to get a second mortgage on my house to buy the software license from ANSYS. I don't know what the software costs.
To be honest, we've come up with another way to avoid the pitfalls of trial-and-error prototyping: We built the Prototype out of Fiberglass, instead of Carbon. It might actually be cheaper to Prototype new Bikes in Fiberglass, than to buy the Software. You can Google "Fiberglass Ladies Bicycle" if you want to see how it turned out.

Also, IIRC, there is a bike from Colnago called the P4 that costs $9,645.
And there is a bike from BPstealth.com , which is another fine monocoque, and may have the lower step-over frame height, if that's what you need, but the price is not listed on the site, and if you have to ask, you can't afford it...

flatlander_48

Probably an easier way to go would be to get a SolidWorks Professional license. It would include the 3-D modeling software, the means to make 2-D working drawings from the 3-D models, the ability to do rendering and presentations and finite element software (I believe they use a version of COSMOS, a competitor of ANSYS). It wouldn't surprise me that one license for that would push $10k and maybe more. The reason I mention SolidWorks is that you need to be able to create the 3-D solid model that defines what you want to analyze. Also realize that professional grade software requires a professional grade computer. You need a fairly stout machine and very good graphics capabilities to run software like this in a reasonably efficient manner.

Basically what FEM software allows you to do is analyze many different configurations in a relatively short period of time. You wind up building fewer prototypes because you eliminate the ones that don't work or don't work as well as you had hoped. Also, it will allow you to do an optimization, given an appropriate goal. The software won't design it for you, but it will help you evaluate anything that you can imagine.

hotbike

The Computer you are talking about used to be called a "Number Cruncher". Back in the 1980's, when I was using an Apple Macintosh, I could easily do Maths. By using the Cmoputer language BASIC, I could do Mathmatical calculations. For instance, I calculated all the prime numbers up to 57251. In High School, using a Commodore PET computer, with only 4k of memory, I programmed the machine to do Quadratic Equations. Again , using the BASIC Language - Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. - (acronym) . Nobody talks about computer languages anymore.

What I want to know about this software is, can it design a bike frame with a single tube, making the top tube and down tube as one, larger diameter tube, like a ladies bicycle, or the BP Stealth? The software might be programed for a Diamond Frame bike, and some designs , like my Daughter's, or the BP Stealth, lack the main triangle, and could be said to be "Topologicaly Dissimillar" . ?

vesteroid

I know almost nothing about bikes, but do have a fully licensed copy of Solid Works.

the seat is upwards of 10K now and buying it is the easy part.

Learning to use it, well that's another story.

flatlander_48

No.

You create a structure with the CAD software, in this case a bicycle frame. The finite element software performs the stress analysis given the material properties, loading and constraints that you specify. The software will NOT design it for you.

No.

I am not talking about how computing was in the 80's. Back then there was usually a CPU chip and a floating point processor chip. The CPU could only handle integer calculations. The floating point processor did decimal calculations in hardware. Today's processors do integer and floating point calculations with no problem. However, what makes newer processors so much better is that many CPU chips have multiple Cores or processors. When the software is written to take advantage of having multiple processors, different parts of the calculations are handed off to different Cores. The result is that everything goes faster.

Now, let it be known that in a few months I will have been a mechanical engineer for 40 years and at various times in my career I've used the following software:

Programming Languages:

• Fortran
• Basic
• Datatrieve (DEC database language)
• DCL (DEC command language)

2-D CAD Programs:

• Gerber
• Applicon
• Intergraph
• Microstation
• AutoCAD
• Autotrol AD-2000
• Anvil

3-D CAD Programs:

• Pro/Engineer
• SolidWorks
• AutoCAD Inventor

Discrete Event Simulation Languages:

• GPSS
• GPSS/H
• SLAM
• AutoMod