Christchurch designer and manufacturer Milton Bloomfield and his company Dynamic Composites have created an aerodynamically advanced wheel that has been selected by Bike New Zealand for its track bikes for the forthcoming World Cup in January and Commonwealth Games in March and future competitions leading up to the Beijing Olympics in 2008.
Bloomfield, whose design genius gained international recognition when Sarah Ulmer rode the bike he designed to an Olympic gold last year, has produced 30 wheels for the team's bikes, each carrying his distinctive 'Zen' branding. The bike frames will be supplied to the team by another manufacturer.
The wheels have been designed to be lighter, with less drag, than the wheels used by other international pursuit teams. They are made of moulded carbon fibre and then tested in the University of Canterbury Engineering School's wind tunnel. Structural testing is carried out at CPIT's engineering department.
"I looked at the wheels of the bikes they use overseas and I could see how it could be done better," Bloomfield said. "You pay a fortune for them overseas, but I couldn't see why you could do it here for much less."
Bloomfield received $30,000 development funding for the project from Sport and Recreation New Zealand through its New Zealand Academy of Sport (NZAS). He said he believed the British track team received over ten times that for technological development.
Richard Young, NZAS performance director, said they had looked far and wide to find the company that could deliver what they needed.
"There are only a handful of people in New Zealand who know carbon fibre, and Milton can do it all - design, create and complete," he said. "The quality of his work puts him right at the top of the list. He's capable of producing the best aerodynamic design in the world. So we've given him the scope and the funding to let him do that."
Bloomfield originally came up with four designs for the wheels and after drag tests, aerodynamic tests and stress tests, as well as comparisons with other wheel brands, "I believe we've got the best wheels in the world," Young said.
Dynamic Composites – Other Design Solutions
NZAS has also engaged Dynamic Composites to design and produce other high performance equipment, such as wheelchair platform design (to stabilise it while shooting goals) and has hired Bloomfield to participate in high performance seminars, "because he's so good at finding ways to solve design problems".
Other sporting codes are also engaging Bloomfield's expertise to design equipment that will help them go faster.
Dynamic Composites has also worked with the New Zealand Men's Bobsled Team to design a lighter bobsled. The team went on to win an America's Cup round this last season, breaking a New Zealand record, and is looking to qualify for the Winter Olympics in February. Bloomfield originally became involved to help the team solve the problem of the brakeman on the sled being 3kg over the weight limit.
Another problem he helped solve was for an offshore hospital that needed a device to hold patients with motor-control disabilities still while being x-rayed. Carbon fibre doesn't interfere with x-rays.
Dynamic Composites' most successful commercial product so far has been the carbon fibre laser 'Kiwi tiller'. Since 1998 more than 2100 units have been produced and exported throughout the world.
Milton Bloomfield is the company's technical director. His father Graham Bloomfield, is commercial director. Other key members of the Dynamic Composites team are Matt Sherwood (design engineer) and Ben Redman (project engineer), and Stuart Yallop (composite Technician).