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Technology Overview

With technology, there are certain rules you have to follow. At NeilPryde, we enjoy breaking those rules every once in a while. For decades, we've pioneered the technology, promoted the talent, and pushed the boundaries with an indomitable spirit of progress. Today, we bring that same spirit to the world of road cycling.

We're the new kids on your block, but we've been developing cutting edge technology and materials for 40 years to design and make things go faster. That's what it's taken to become an official Olympic supplier. And we mastered the art of using carbon fibre in our windsurf masts and booms years before most bike companies even considered using it to make frames. We are pioneers and that's what gives us the edge over our competitors.

But we also rely on many "traditional" tools and skills.

Many of our rivals use the same technology we pioneered yesterday, today, and this drives us on to be even better tomorrow.
Extended Kamm: Progressive truncated profile in the down tube and specific proportions of the lower seat tube create an extended Kammtail
Performance: Tube profiles optimised for aerodynamic performance
Stiffness: Tube profiles refined for maximum stiffness
Lightweight: Tube profiles designed for light weight
C6.7: NeilPryde C6.7 high-modulus unidirectional carbon fibre
Exoskeleton: Tubes, joints and transitions incorporate continuous carbon fibres in strategic locations for optimum power transfer and riding performance

Computational Fluid Dynamics

You can't refine the design of an aerodynamic road bike without conducting extensive wind tunnel testing, and you shouldn't venture into a wind tunnel before understanding the aerodynamic performance of each tube, joint and transition. This is only possible through utilising Computational Fluid

Traditional airfoil shape of head tube maintains laminar airflow
Dynamics to understand the intricate nature of air flowing around the complex structures of a road bike. It isn't just about making a bike look skinny from the front; decreasing the frontal area of the frame. If only aerodynamics were that simple.


Extended Kammtail effect in lower section of down tube and seat tube

FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

When we first began to dream about developing cutting-edge, high-performance road bikes we started as we do with most of our projects, with a blank piece of paper. However, while the paper may have been blank, the knowledge base from which the designs came from was extensive. We've cut and stitched, molded and formed, machined and extruded, a variety of materials over the last 40 years to make a wide range of products that enable athletes to push the boundaries.

When you're developing high-performance products you need to understand the properties of the materials you're working with and the forces involved. In the early stages of development we used Finite Element Analysis extensively to investigate the structural performance of the bike frames and their response to dynamic loadings. This method considers the components of the frame as a mesh and mathematically determines the displacement of the nodes of the mesh under applied loadings so that the performance of the frames can be optimised for their design function.

Finite Element Analysis - Side view
Finite Element Analysis of tube profiles in raw frameFinite Element Analysis - Front view

Wind Tunnel Testing of Alize Prototype R02:V02