Brian Cloyd's Recumbent Trike impresses NASA

NASA has been known to encourage all forms of activities that are even remotely associated with moon and space travel across all levels of a student’s academic career. One such activity that it holds every year at the Marshall Space Flight Center, Hunstville, Alabama is its Great Moonbuggy Race. With a mission of spotting talent this race encourages students to design and build light-weight human powered vehicles capable of traveling the rugged lunar landscape. One of the technologies showcased at this year’s Moonbuggy race was the “recumbent human powered trike’ put together by a group of Industrial Design students from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).

Recumbent Trike

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Recumbent Trike

Human-powered Trike by Brian Cloyed

With Brian Cloyd, a graduate student from RISD as the design lead for steering and suspension systems in addition to being the co-leader for the human-powered trike project, the team won the coveted best design award amongst the odd 40+ competing universities. Contrived to overcome challenges associated with and during lunar travel, the human powered trike was designed using the principle of Freewheel differential which brought forth simplicity in the basic drive assembly design.

Additionally, the bearing holders used for the project were also of the press-fit type thereby affording a blending of simplicity with pioneering design. Use of shielded drive sprockets helped prevent excessive accumulation of dirt and grime inside the alignment tube during transport and hence afforded lower maintenance. Moreover, disk brakes too were positioned on the outside of the differential thereby affording better braking. Using these basics, the team from RISD managed to create their trike which outshone highly technical projects just on the merit of basic designing that was probably just beyond the basic aesthetic sense.

No doubt, probably the human-powered trike would not be aesthetic looking for many, but as long as it is capable of negotiating twisting curves as well as treacherous gravel pits encountered on the lunar landscape with efficiency better than the other “seemingly well endowed” means of transport, NASA ain’t complaining. Way to go RISD!

Via: BryanCloyd