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A California-based company has a new kind of wheel for skateboards that delivers a novel shape and claims a special ride experience. This is the Shark Wheel, not circular, not square, but something more interesting. The wheels appear as square when in motion from a side view but the wheel geometry is more than that. The wheels feel circular to the rider, and viewing them along with more details may help to clear the mystique. The wheels are made of three strips each; these create a helical shape when they roll, and they form a sine wave pattern. When the wheels make contact with the ground, good things happen, say the team behind the wheels - the user gets speed, better grip, and a smoother ride.
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Shark Wheel to Reinvent Skateboarding Experience
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(Score: 1) by Immerman on Saturday May 24 2014, @03:25PM
Roll a ball across a level plane - notice how it still comes to a stop, even in a vacuum? That's rolling resistance in action, a well known factor among engineers everywhere.
Rolling objects lose energy by two primary channels:
Deformation of the area in contact with the ground by the weight of the object
Surface adhesion - even two perfectly smooth surfaces will still generally experience electrostatic and van der Waals adhesion.
They sound like they should be miniscule, but in practice they're the primary avenue of energy loss unless you're going fast enough for air resistance to become a major factor.