Special Topics in Sports Engineering

WARNING: This course is an intensive, full-time 2 week summer course that occurs during the two weeks between the Q4 exam and resit. Plan accordingly for the work load.

Please note: If there are not enough registered students, it is possible that the course will not be taught.

Check the course website for up-to-date information and instructions for registering (limited capacity):

https://moorepants.github.io/me41035/

Special Topics in Sports Engineering is an inter-university course for Master students in Mechanical Engineering, Movement Sciences, Sport Sciences, and other related MSc programs. The course is organized as a two-week intensive course and comprises lectures, demonstrations, practicals, hands-on research, and a final field test. The course will be taught by staff from the six participating universities.

The course is organized around a basic theme relevant for sports engineering and this year's theme will be "Maximizing cycling performance". During the course students will work out what aspects determine cycling performance, and collect data (through experiments or literature research) that are needed to develop and feed a simulation program for the estimation of the optimal bicycle rider combination and the maximal performance humanly possible. The course's final activity will be a test ride to quantify the differences between actual performance and predicted performance.

In this course, students will have to answer the question:

Given a particular bike, what will be your own predicted time over a given distance and track and how well does this match reality?

The prediction should be based on a power-based simulation model of cycling and the relevant bicycle and rider dependent parameters, which have to be collected experimentally. Answering this question will require insight in relevant parameters, but also collecting these parameters, for each individual student with his or her individual bike. The bike in question can be chosen freely and might therefore be a top-end racing bike as well as your grandmother's shopping bike.