Treadmill, v.2008

Written by Tom Nugent on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

If you were at the 2007 Beam Power competition, you probably saw our 18′ tall treadmill. It was very useful for testing our vehicle, and so we of course wanted to use it for this year’s system. We’ve “upgraded” it to handle the steel cable for this year’s competition. The cable tensioning mechanism is easier to use than last year too. Last year we had to tighten two bolts to move one of the rollers. This year we have a pneumatic mechanism which angles one of the bicycle wheels (also a new feature) to add tension, so it will be easier to calibrate. There’s a simple DC motor at the base with a small tire which can drive the bicycle wheels, so we can do lots of testing at various speeds.

We’ve also built a smaller, ‘bench-top’ treadmill for on-going development work, shorter testing, and efficiency measurements. But when we want to perform something like an endurance test, we turn to the big one.

We want to again thank one of last year’s sponsors, Pacific Integrated Handling (PIH), for their donation of some great Bosch extruded aluminum hardware, which enables us to build structures like this (the frame itself is from elsewhere, but the mounts for the wheels and various other structural elements are from PIH).