Mechanical doping?

On Sunday, July 26, 2015 at 5:50:35 PM UTC+1, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Sun, 26 Jul 2015 07:06:33 -0700 (PDT), Andre Jute
wrote:

Now we're cooking with gas!

I was thinking more like "powered by hot air".

That too.

("Npw we're cooking with gas!" is a British saying for doing something right, carried into popular culture by a slogan for British Gas.)

The nice thing about compressed air power augmentation is that if I am
caught using such a device, I could claim that it's used to refill my
tires with air in the event of a puncture. In other words, a safety
feature.

Personally, I don't see the problem with using such a device as long
as it's human powered and starts discharged or deflated. Under such
conditions, *ALL* the power the device stores comes from the rider and
not from some external source (such as a pre-charged battery,
pre-inflated tank, or fuel powered engine). In effect, it averages
the riders high and low energy points, by storing energy on the easy
downhills, and returning it on the difficult uphills. It's an
improvement to the state of the cycling art that should be welcomed by
the race organizers, not banned.

Disclaimer: I know nothing of professional bicycle racing and
therefore might have missed something obvious here.

Yeah, you did. I know only a little more than you claim to know about bicycle racing, but everyone who's paid the slightest attention knows it is an explicitly anti-technology environment. It's no accident that the top man at the UCI is from a working class Irish background -- bicycle racing is an extension of the class war, under the pretense of keeping costs down so any workingman can enter the races and raise himself out of poverty. It's not considered politically correct to add, "if he has as much money and management talent as one of the major multinationals who sponsor the teaams."

Who knows, they might be right on the specific subject of energy recovery. Over in Formula One, automobile racing's top class, they've been whining for years about bringing the outrageous costs down, but at the same time they're trying to make formula relevant to car manufacturers who're now the only people with the money and the intest to operate leading teams. As part of this driver billions have been spent on developing energy recovery systems for twenty racing cars with absolutely no fallback utility. I think this would be just too expensive for bicycles. But, then again, who knows where the technology will stand in a few years, and how little it will cost.

Drivel: I seem to recall that there was some experimentation with
storing the energy wasted in the vertical motion of a bicycle and
using the stored energy for forward propulsion. I would use gas
shocks and a valve to compress air into a storage tank, which then
drives an auxiliary air motor, but it might have been done by another
method, such as a seat pump in the seat tube. Every time the bicycle
goes over a bump or lands hard after a short flight, instead of
bouncing the rider, the vertical energy is stored in a pressure vessel
for later use. As I recall, the amount of stored energy was fairly
substantial on rough roads, cobblestones, and curb jumping. The
problem is that I can't seem to find any references or reports. Help?

It's a pity my google-bug, Carl Vogel, ran away, or I could have lent him to you.

--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558