ELECTRIC BIKE DESIGN
Capella, as Truong Minh Nhat calls his
creation, is an electric bike made with light composites that the Ho
Chi Minh City University of Architecture student says can be folded and
put into a backpack.
Capella can
have its wheels, chain and chain-ring bolt folded into the body.
Users
can take the bike along when traveling and escape the crowd anywhere,
Nhat says, adding that it can travel at 30 kilometers per hour with a
battery that will run for 12 kilometers after it is charged for two
hours.
Nhat says most
of the designed components are not available in the market, like a
semicircle top bar.
“I
had to convince and explain a lot to bike component makers, although I
was making only one and offered them high prices,” he says.
Starting the
project more than half a year ago as his graduation thesis, Nhat put a
lot of time and effort into it.
He
spent one month sketching out the design, which was inspired by the
Unicorn that controls the star Capella in Greek mythology.
“My product
targets teenagers who want to ride bicycles, so I paid due attention to
its stylish design,” Nhat says.
To
ensure that all the parts followed the design, Nhat had to stay with
the people making them all the time and because they were more than 30
kilometers apart, he had to shuttle back and forth many times everyday.
Two days
before the deadline, Nhat was overwhelmed with separate components,
electricity systems and batteries.
He
invited some workers to his house to assemble the bike. All of them
then slept for only two hours each night until the bike was complete,
Nhat says.
Although he
submitted his product just two hours before the deadline, he obtained
high marks for it.
“My
application for intellectual property right has been approved,” says
the graduate of the university’s Industrial Design Department.
“I
am now studying ways to improve the bike’s eminent functions before
seeking partners to launch the product in the market at a price
reasonable for Vietnamese people.”
Since the
first bike was made manually by assembling separate components, it
still has certain shortcomings, he says.
Nhat expects
to replace some of the bike’s components with even lighter materials to
reduce its weight to around 10 kilograms.
Source: Tuoi Tre
ELECTRIC BIKE
DESIGN |