CUSTOM BIKE MAKER USES ALGOR SOFTWARE TO DESIGN AND ENGINEER CARBON FIBER BICYCLES

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, December 8, 1997 - Those high performance bicycles speeding along the Olympics route or the Tour de France are usually custom-made and can cost as much as $25,000 each. An Ogden, Utah custom bicycle designer is utilizing Algor software and cutting the cost to less than half.

Mark Enders, of Composite Arts and Science, employs the vacuum bag technology used to make composite rocket motor cases to craft carbon fibers and epoxy into customized bike frames which are more comfortable and more aerodynamic than traditional steel, aluminum or titanium frames. "With composite materials, we can tailor the bike frame stiffness so that the bottom bracket area does not flex laterally and, therefore, more of the energy from the rider's legs goes into forward motion," explains Enders.

Enders' patented high-performance "beam" bicycles are inexpensive compared to his high-end competition, with each bike going for $5,000-6,000 and each tandem for $8,000-12,000.

"Most of the people who buy my bikes are enthusiastic cyclists, but a few compete," says Enders. "The bikes you buy off the rack usually come in three sizes: small, medium and large, and not every body really fits the standard molds. People who buy our bikes get really excited about having a custom carbon fiber bike that fits their body size perfectly."

To create a bike to the size and specifications of the customer, Enders must, in a sense, design and engineer each bike from scratch. "While not quite as complicated as an airplane, custom designing a bicycle is similar because it is very engineering-intensive," says Enders. "Algor is the ideal software tool for me, because it has composite design capabilities built into a very powerful engineering software."

The key engineering challenge in designing a composite bicycle frame is to determine where and at what angles to place the carbon material in the body of the frame. Enders designs the frame using Algor's Superdraw, which has the look and feel of a computer-aided design program, but produces designs that can be engineered readily using finite element analysis. Finite element analysis (FEA) breaks a model into small uniform elements, then tests each of the elements for how they react to real-world conditions.

After Algor automatically meshes the sculpted surface model of Enders' design, he uses Algor's FEA composite processors to analyze how the frame will respond to stress. "Because Algor is so easy to use, I typically design at least eight lay-up iterations of each bike frame," says Enders. "Without Algor's speed and ease of use, the design phase would take much longer, and it would be next to impossible to optimize the composite materials' ansitropic properties."

Enders is always striving to design a lighter bicycle, while retaining high performance and comfort. Using Algor, he has been able to shave about seven percent off the weight of his tandem models and is working to take about 15 percent off the weight of his latest single bicycle frames.

"At this point, it's cost prohibitive to destructively test the frames. I rely on Algor's accurate results to ensure that my bikes stand up to the stress of running in the real world," says Enders.

Enders currently sells the bikes in the Ogden, Utah area but has plans to distribute them nationally in the near future. "It would have been impractical to start this business without a design and engineering software tool like Algor that combines high performance, speed and low cost."