DRAG FORCE ON ROTATING RACING CYCLE WHEELS

The professional cyclist employs a variety of wheel designs in an atte mpt to reduce drag and improve overall performance. Such wheels includ e the partially or fully clad wheel, the racing disc-wheel and the aer o-rim. Little if any openly published data on the performance of these wheels is available. This paper describes a series of experiments car ried out on a full size racing cycle wheel, fitted with different degr ees of cladding, and rotated at various air speed/wheel speed ratios. The results are compared with similar tests performed on the racing di sc-wheel and the aero-rim wheel. The results showed that for wind spee ds less than or equal to 10 m/s, the fully clad wheel exhibited the lo west drag while at wind speeds greater than or equal to 15 m/s, the ra cing disc-wheel and the fully clad wheel gave similar drag coefficient s. The aero-rim wheel exhibited the highest drag of the commercial whe els at wind speeds greater than 5 m/s.