I Tried Solid Bike Tires | Here's What I Found

it's 2022. we've got billionaires joyriding in space we're training viruses to fight cancer so why does my bike tire still go flat about once a month why hasn't nasa solved this where is my airless space tire i live in bristol in the uk we invented banksy imdb and hills and yet everyone here still cycles in a city of bikes where do those disused bike tires go it turns out each year more than one million tons of old bike tyres and inner tubes end up in landfill surely there is a better way you might have been excited to hear about the tyres coming to market that use some nasa technology called nitinol a shape memory alloy its weave together into a chainmail bike mesh to produce a tyre with no air needed to retain its shape below it looks cool it has a lot of problems still to solve before it's anywhere close to usable how do you fit them to the rim of a bike how do you coat them in a rubber compound to actually give them some grip and what happens if one of these nitinol wires were to break i think there's a better approach and i think it might be this this is the cross-section of the world's most advanced airless bike tire it doesn't look like much but it's the product of 10 years of research and development activity it's a bike tire that doesn't go flat which sounds easy and sounds obvious but the science that goes into it is incredibly hard to get right today i want to look at the difficulty of making bike tires that don't go flat and tell you why i think this is the future hi i'm dr ben miles i help scientists turn scientific breakthroughs that improve the health of people or health of the planet get into the hands of society today i want to talk to you about one of the companies that i've been working with supporting for the last couple months because i really think they are onto something i'm naturally conflicted in this conversation but this video isn't sponsored and i'm not being paid to say anything i'm going to do my best to present this story as subjectively as i possibly can but it is worth taking anything i say as opinion today i want to talk about the science of reinventing the wheel i got the opportunity to visit a small workshop out in the west country at a place called gecko rubber tires and to meet the founder richard who i can only describe as a rubber chemistry wizard he's made new rubber materials for formula one companies that we aren't allowed to name he's made rubber grips for military hardware and obviously he's made one or two bike tyres in his time his workshop is coated in bike tires and all of the custom tools that he's made to produce and prepare them 10 years of working on this tire problem has produced this this tire isn't like most it's made from a blend of rubbers using a patented two-stage rubber heating process that grows the rubber into the right shape and in doing so fills it full of millions of tiny gas bubbles trapped inside the rubber to produce something called cellular rubber with properties tuned to make them great for bike tires because we've got a solid tyre as opposed to a pneumatic tire with an airfield inner tube through it we're looking at getting the bulk modulus of the tyre strong enough to support the weight of a rider yet the material has the high bounced seniors that gives us a comfortable ride and low rolling resistance to give a bit of a highlight as to what i want to talk about solid tires have actually been around for a while and they have all sucked with complaints typically focusing around how slow heavy difficult to fit uncomfortable and lacking in grip these solid tires are historically there are basically three conflicting variables that mean solid tyres haven't met the expectations of cyclists number one rolling resistance how difficult is it to actually cycle the stiffer the material you make the tire out of the better it performs however this negatively affects comfort bigger chunkier tyres help here to smooth out the ride however the bigger the tire the more it weighs weight or density the lighter it is the better the easier it is to ride the less work that you need to put in but typically the less stiff that rubber tyre becomes making its rolling resistance higher which takes you back in the loop it's a fight between these properties and so far it's meant no one has really cracked a solution that has really caught on most complaints are around how uncomfortable or sluggish the ride is the best solution to date are pneumatics or airfield tyres using an inner tube the downside though is that this is the inside of a normal bike tire a normal bicycle tire has steel beads running through the bead area has textiles casings that run all the way from the bead round to the bead they have these under tread puncture resistant layers although you can still get a puncture and then you have a tread compound and usually a bead compound which is different and then you've got a material on the inside that coats the fabric the text armature and that's another rubber compound so you've got three four five different rubber comp six different rubber compounds plus steel textiles and other materials and as a result they are incredibly difficult to recycle it's hugely energy intensive and so usually it's cheaper just to throw it away and make a new one than to reconstitute old tires according to research by continental a big bike tire manufacturer discarded tires take up space in landfills and collect emitted methane gas from the landfill in the tire cavities causing those tyres to become buoyant and rise to the surface which can break the landfill liner and spread pollutants into soil and groundwater on top of that although natural rubber is natural it has some sustainability issues similar to palm oil where rainforests are being cut down in the tropics to make room for rubber tree plantations oh and obviously airfield bike tires still go flat now for elite cyclists where every second counts pneumatics probably will always win but i don't think that's where solid tires are trying to excel i think they're targeting the everyday cyclist the commuter the student the environmentally conscious person that has picked cycling over driving but the big question is how do they hold up i tried the gecko tires the leading competitor and pneumatics out for about a month in rotation around bristol and my honest feedback sounds really strange i kept finding myself saying i have no real complaints and now that doesn't sound that positive but actually it really is so let's talk about it point one rolling resistance pneumatic or airfield tyres kick solid tires butts when it comes to rolling resistance due to something called the coefficient of restitution commonly this is defined as a measure between final velocities and initial velocities between two objects before and after a collision so for example if you were to bounce to snooker or pull balls together the first one stops the second one takes off at pretty much the same speed as the first one this is because this is a highly elastic collision it has a high coefficient of restitution pretty close to one air is also pretty close to perfect with the coefficient of restitution approximately around one so as a bike tyre spins the tyre compresses the deformation of that tyre as it comes in contact with the road compresses the air within the bike tire but that compression that energy that is stored within that compressed air is given back to you as you keep moving what this feels like is a smooth frictionless bike ride the air is able to return that energy back out into the ground into the wheel compared to when you might have say a flat tire and pedaling becomes really hard and really sluggish so the challenge here is to have that high coefficient of restitution like a pneumatic but without using an air filled inner tube these tyres achieve that because inside are essentially hundreds and thousands of tiny bubbles of air captured and surrounded by small cells of rubber this means that you retain the air-like properties of a tire but remove the possibility that you could get a puncture one semi-scientific way to measure this is with a bounce test measuring the rebound height relative to the dropped height and seeing what percent of the original drop height the tyre can reach comparing the pneumatic against the leading solid tyre against the gecko tyres the numbers came out as 70 for the pneumatic 52 for the leading competitor and about 58 for the gecko tire now this isn't particularly scientific a lot of factors can affect it the tension of the tires the weight of the rims so take that answer with a little bit of salt but let's ask the big question how does it actually feel to ride switching to the leading competitor a company called tannis and using their best product that they have on the market i did my everyday work commute about eight miles round trip a couple of times over a few days and i can honestly say i was thinking the whole time about how i couldn't wait for the next day so that i could take them off and put a different tire on you feel every single bump and hurdle that you go over and i actually found myself avoiding even minor cracks on the road uh just because it was it was kind of painful it was kind of uncomfortable by counterpoint when it came to the gecko tires i put them on and i actually kept them on were they firmer yes absolutely they were kind of like riding just a really pumped up air-filled tire and honestly i found myself just enjoying not needing to feel like i had to give them a squeeze in the morning before setting off to check if they were still pumped up and if not to then have to pump them up when i was actually running the trial i got two flat tires on two different days when i was using pneumatics and i jog walked with the bike what i've affectionately now called a business run the rest of the way into the office so that i wasn't late for meetings to me the chance of that happening just isn't worth it let's talk about weight when it came to weight obviously airfield tyres do pretty well because they're filled with air i really don't know much about tire weights so i'll just refer to an article i found comparing the gecko tires to airless tyres the current 700x28 gecko airless road tyre is about 400 grams each the author compared this against their 320 gram trusty gator skin flat resistant tire plus a standard continental 700 by 28 presto valve tube which comes in 135 grams for a total weight of 455 grams a full 55 grams more than a gecko airless tire i told you this guy was a rubber wizard i've been asked not to go into detail about the specifics of the properties when it comes to density and weights at the moment as the gecko team are still finalizing their product but if you'd like to try them they are doing a very limited supply on kickstarter at the moment i'll leave a link in the description this will probably be a one-time thing as this probably is more of a b2b offering as in a business-to-business offering so here is your one chance to get a direct from the factory bike tire let's look at some other properties i looked at in a kind of rapid fire round as we're running out of time time to change the gecko tire two to five minutes and you get to use a rubber mallet as demonstrated here by richard the leading competitor the tennis tires about 40 minutes to an hour plus what i would say is my sanity and self-respect this was a hard bike tire to change and i probably would never do it again lifetime of the tire about two to four years which seems like a wide time span but i guess it depends on how heavily you use them the rear tail cost is about 40 to 50 pounds kind of mid-range for a tire you can definitely get cheaper ones if you want to but i think there's an interesting economic argument here as to the hidden costs to you in terms of time that you would spend changing or repairing tyres and also going out and buying replacement inner tubes then you can get into a whole argument about what an hour of your time is actually worth but i'll leave that conversation there here's the interesting one recyclability 100 recyclable it is a single compound so all you have to do is grind it up reformulate it and you can make it into a new batch of tires as far as i can find it is the only 100 recyclable bike tire in the world so how do i feel overall conclusion first product review on the channel honestly i'm pretty sold gekko have optimized their rubber processing technique to create solid tires that i think outperform the leading competitor in a way for the first time that actually makes a solid bike tire actually viable it comes as close as i think you possibly can do to the performance of a pneumatic like i said it's not going to be for absolutely everyone if you want to shave off every single second of your time during a race say use a pneumatic tire but if you are basically anyone else i would say a solid tire actually could be for you and you don't have to wait until the nasa technology works out all the kinks so have these guys reinvented the tire yeah i think so thanks very much for watching i'll see you next time goodbye

Channel: Dr Ben Miles

Views: 875,614

Keywords: science, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, startup, spinout, research, how to run a business, business, innovation, future

Id: SXAkzNTL2tc

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 22 2022