Regenerative Braking System on a Conventional Bike

As the world’s supply of natural resources diminishes, the quest for renewable energy solutions is becoming more and more critical. To help curb the use of non-renewable energy sources, scientist and engineers are tasked with the challenge of finding alternative energies. One of these alternative sources is recovering energy lost to mechanical systems, which could counteract the world's energy shortage. Regenerative braking has already been implemented in hybrid and electric vehicles; however, this paper introduces a regenerative braking system specifically for the conventional, every-day bike. The RE-Brake system recaptures energy that would normally be lost to friction by replacing a conventional caliper brake with a rotating disk that runs along a bike tire’s metallic rim, spinning an electric generator. This recovered energy could be used to power a mobile electronic device. Since hundreds of thousands of people rely on bicycles as their primary method of transportation, RE-Brake, a cheap and user-friendly replacement to caliper brakes, could be used to recover a vast amount of energy and serve as an approach to offset the global energy crisis, but provides society with a cheap and user-friendly product is unprecedented. The skills learned from this project were invaluable, as research, design, trial and error, as well as technical writing are all important experiences within engineering. This brake not only provides scientists and researchers with more valuable information about alternative energy, but is also capable of educating the everyday person about the basics of engineering as well as the importance of renewable resources. Introduction This paper shares a sample project illustrating a new teaching approach via innovation. One of the objectives of the Experiential Engineering Education and this paper is to reform engineering education by moving away from the boundaries of traditional classroom-based approaches to projectconceptand team-based, and skilland knowledge-integrated approaches using real world situations. This new teaching approach can improve the effectiveness of engineering education. We develop an innovative teaching approach for the newly designed eight credit hour cornerstone course for the first year engineering students. This method is very effective and well-suited to educate our students. Rather than just studying for exams to gain good grades, this skilland knowledge-integrated approaches help highly motivated students to interact with other students and faculties from various institutions and take further strides towards real world situations. References 5-8 represent four team papers (which includes sixteen students) published in peer reviewed conference proceedings. Briefly, these papers outline this theme based teaching approach, in which each team needs to identify an energy system and innovate it. Each team has about four members, and worked on the experiential learning project for about 10-12 weeks. This paper describes the Regenerative Braking System on a Conventional Bike. We hope that the benefits of this teaching approach shown using this sample project-based learning could serve as a model for other educators.