Why Things Don't Fail

Most of the load-bearing parts, members, and structures we

encounter in the course of daily life perform their intended
function reliably and unobtrusively. We pay little, if any, attention
to how these products are designed because they generally do
what they are intended to do. The humble bicycle is a classic
example of one such design that benefits millions of people
every day of every year.

Neglect is usually the cause of catastrophic bicycle failures in the

United States. Left lying in the driveway by their young owners,
bicycles are frequently crushed under the rear wheels of the
family automobile as it exits the garage, at deliberate speed, in
reverse gear. Not even the best of bikes can hope to stop a
Buick on autopilot, heading out for the shopping mall. Yet, with
the possible exception of an occasional bent wheel or even
rarer fatigue fracture, most bicycles refuse to yield to the normal
abuses they must endure when ridden by their owners.
Accordingly, bicycles are an excellent vehicle for demonstrating
to your students that good design can eliminate most product
failures.

Usually constructed of metal tubes welded together, the frame is

the foundation of the modern bicycle. It distributes the forces
exerted by the rider on the seat, handlebar, and pedals, through
the fork, legs, stays, crank, chain, and gears, to the wheels.
Consequently, the frame is subjected to a broad range of
combined stresses. The down tube, located between the bottom
bracket (which holds the crank assembly) and the steering head
(which holds the front fork and steering stem), is of special
interest. The portions of the loads from the steering head, seat
tube, and chain stays that lie in the plane of the frame combine
to produce axial and bending loads in the down tube. However,
as shown below, the force applied to the pedal on the crank is
offset from that plane by a moment arm. It and the
corresponding counterforce in the handlebar needed for
maintaining equilibrium produce a substantial amount of torque
in the down tube as well. As force is alternately applied to the
pedals first on one side and then the other while pedaling the
bicycle, the planes of the wheels oscillate back and forth across
the plane of the frame. While this undesirable deflection cannot
be completely eliminated, it can be minimized by a rigid frame.
Accordingly, the down tube must be strong enough to support
the combination of load-induced axial, bending, and torsional
stresses, stiff enough to minimize deflections, and lightweight
enough that the cyclist can propel themselves and the machine
from Point A to Point B with something less than a hernial effort.
 Forces on pedal and handlebar produce torque in down tube.

Determining just how much load the down tube of a bicycle can
support is a simple student exercise in failure analysis. Consider,
for example, what happens as the rider sits on the seat of the
bicycle. When the bicycle and rider are balanced, the
gravitational force acting on the rider remains entirely in the
plane of the frame. This force is distributed throughout the various
frame components in such a way that, ignoring the weight of the
bike, the sum of the forces exerted by the tires on the ground
exactly equals that of the gravitational force acting on the rider.
The portions of these forces acting on the down tube under
these equilibrium conditions can produce a combination of in-
plane axial and bending stresses. The forces, applied only at the
end of the tube, produce simple bending such that the
distribution of combined stresses varies around the
circumference of the tube but is relatively uniform along its
length.
 View of the underside of the down tube with strain gage rosette
installed to determine the principal strains produced by various
loading conditions.

Small strain gage rosettes* installed on the upper and lower

surfaces of the down tube will quickly confirm the nature of the
stress distribution. For the bicycle shown here, EA-06-060RZ-120
Student Gage rosettes were bonded with M-Bond 200
cyanoacrylate adhesive. A Model P-3500 Portable Strain
Indicator and Model SB-10 Switch and Balance Unit were
connected to make static measurements of strains while known
loads we applied to the bicycle. The strain data obtained with
the rosettes was reduced in accordance wit Tech Note TN-515,
Strain Gage Rosettes Selection, Application and Data Reduction,
to obtain the principal strains and their directions.

Assuming nominal materials parameters for steel , Hooke's law for

biaxial stresses in an isotropic material was utilized to calculate
the principal stresses from the strains.
* Under ideal conditions, rosettes are installed on a flat surface to measure strains in the
plane of that surface. The surfaces of tubes obviously are not flat. However, if the diameter
of the tube is large relative to the width of the rosette, the surface under the rosette will be
sufficiently flat to obtain meaningful results
When loads were applied to the seat of the bicycle, the
calculations based on measurement data indicated a uniaxial
stress state. The minimum principal stresses, transverse to the
tube, were zero for all practical purposes. The nonzero maximum
principal stress was aligned, within a few degrees, along the axis
of the tube. The magnitudes of these stresses were small; each
pound of load on the seat produced a maximum stress of only
4.1psi on the lower surface and 2.9psi on the upper surface. The
difference in the resulting stresses is caused by a combination of
bending and axial forces acting on the tube. The portion due to
bending depends upon the location of the neutral axis; in this
case the bending stress must be within the range of +1.2psi.
Therefore, when a load is applied to the seat, the down tube
experiences an axial stress in combination with a smaller bending
stress.

So just how much load will the bicycle support before failure by
yielding? That, of course, depends upon the yield strength of the
material and the failure criterion. Welded mechanical tube,
made from relatively inexpensive carbon steel, typically has a
yield strength of about 35 000psi. Substituting the principal
stresses per unit load, , for the principal stresses and setting
the relative strength to unity, the load required to initiate yielding,
, can be calculated from:

Because a uniaxial stress exists in the present case, all the failure
criteria predict that yielding in the lower surface of the down
tube would occur were an 8500lb gorilla to sit on the seat! Since
twenty fully grown gorillas weigh less than that, the down tube
either is drastically overdesigned or has some other more
important role to play.

Suppose that rather than sitting on the seat, the gorilla presses on
the pedal with its foot to propel the bicycle forward. The
principal stresses in the down tube undergo a drastic change in
both magnitude and direction. With each pound of load
applied vertically in the center of the foot pedal, the maximum
principal stress increases by 33psi and the minimum stress
decreases by -31 psi. And, the maximum principal stress is now
oriented at nearly a 45-degree angle to the axis of the down
tube. A shear stress, resulting from the application of the out-of-
plane load to the pedal and crank, now dominates the smaller
axial and bending stresses in the down tube. Applying the
various failure criteria, we shall see that a down tube under this
complex state of stress can only support a much smaller load.

As before, the load required to initiate yielding in the down tube

as the bike is being pedaled can be calculated with the
previous equation. However, each criterion predicts a different
load in this case:

Criteria Py (lbs)
Rankine 1060
St.Venant 830
Tresca 550
Haigh 680
von Mises 630
While an obese Gorilla gorilla may permanently bend the down
tube of this bike during pedaling, even the conservative Tresca
criterion suggests that the tube should easily support the young
Homo sapiens for which it was designed. Indeed, a strength ratio
(safety factor) of about 6 for a 100lb rider is still excessive in terms
of failure by yielding. However, it does afford the stiffness to limit
twisting to about +0.5 degrees between the two ends of the
down tube when the bike is pedaled on alternate sides by the
same young rider.

The requirements for rigidity often result in the design of

components that, under the load encountered in service,
experience stress levels far below those necessary to cause the
onset of failure by fracture or yielding. This contributes greatly to
the ability of components like the down tube to avoid
catastrophic failure while in use. And, even when greater
flexibility is acceptable, a considerable safety margin is still often
possible through material selection and component design.
Returning once again to our bicycle, the crank itself is a good
example of a safe design with greater flexibility.

Force on pedal produces both torque and bending along the

central axis of the crank.
The bottom bracket of the frame holds the crank assembly.
When the bicycle is pedaled, the crank spins about its central
axis to turn the chain sprocket. However, the crank is restrained
by the bracket in such a way that the central axis itself is not free
to rotate in any other direction. The pedals, attached to the
crank arms, are offset from the bracket. Accordingly, any force
applied to a pedal produces bending stresses in the crank. These
are combined with torsional stresses produced along the central
axis as the force applied to a pedal reacts through the crank
arm to drive the chain sprocket. While the bending stresses
remain essentially unchanged at all pedal positions for a
constant force, the torsional stresses reach a peak when the
applied force is normal to the crank arms as shown below.

A small strain gage rosette installed on the top surface of the

crank between the crank arm and bracket can be used to
measure the combined strains in this critical component. (When
the cross-sectional area of the crank is constant, the bending
strains will be greatest near the bracket.) In the bicycle shown
here, each pound of force acting on the pedal increased the
maximum principal stress by 138psi at a 25-degree angle from
the central axis. The minimum principal stress, located 90
degrees away, simultaneously decreased by 17psi for each
pound of force applied to the pedal.

Strain gage rosette installed on crank to measure bending and

torsional strains.

Under these conditions, the maximum normal strains in the crank

are more than three times as large as those in the down tube for
the same load, the shear strains are over twice as large.
Accordingly, in the vicinity of the strain measurements, the crank
is considerably more flexible than the frame. It bends, but will it
break? Once again applying the various failure criteria to a
material with the same mechanical properties, the load required
to initiate yielding in the crank can be calculated:

Criteria Py (lbs)
Rankine 255
St.Venant 245
 Tresca 225
Haigh 240
von Mises 235
With a relative strength of approximately 2 for a 100lb rider, the
crank is sufficiently strong for its intended use. A 4001b gorilla, on
the other hand, could cause some rather serious permanent
damage to the pedal.

The bicycle is a complex machine that experiences a wide

variety of constantly changing states of stress and strain. In
addition to the down tube and crank, the spokes, wheel rims,
handlebar, forks, stays, and other parts are also interesting
subjects for stress analysis. In fact, by assigning a group of
students to each part, a single inexpensive bicycle can become
the vehicle for an excellent laboratory project involving an entire
class. The most difficult aspect, of course, is restraining the gorilla
from riding the bike until after the project can be completed!

Mohr circles of stress for down tube with unit load applied to seat
(A) and pedal (B); and for crank with combined torque and
bending load (C).