Frame-integrated hydration...the non-aero upsides?

Triathlon Forum
1

So the bladder thing has been tried before…CAT Cheetah’s “Oasis” option being one that comes to mind…

http://www.eurospares.com/catbike2.jpg

we gave it a whirl in R&D too during the F-1 team era of our first carbon TT bikes. So prior art isn’t the problem. Lots to learn from and improve upon.

You’d think it’s the ultimate expression of aero hydration solutions…taking funky shaped bottles one step further by eliminating their big drawback: funky shapes. But I’m having a hard time justifying it (or a new aerobottle project, for that matter) on user-friendliness grounds. There’s a lot to be said for the flexibility offered by ordinary decent bottles.

(irony meter goes off the scale as someone points out ordinary decent front end components make a quasi-superbike easier to work on…stipulated…that’s why it’s a quasi-superbike)

Back to hydration. Take aero benefits out of the equation for a moment and help me out here: is there any other reason you who want this, want this? Or is it simply a case of willingness to put up with a little more inconvenience to get closer to what you believe is the fastest system?

2

Ability to refil on the go, see how much I’ve drunk / clean container and not have to stick to plain water / russian roulette with botulism.

Front aero bottle, 2 frame mounts and I was sorted for IMs without needing anything other than plain water from the aid stations. Not the most aero, but as I ran past all the people that had saved 2 mins in aero / weight by taking the lottery of on course drinks and were then proceeding to bonk/chunder their way through the 26.2 miles then I reckoned on balance I was the happier with my set up.

Just because it’s not complicated / expensive / very clever / new doesn’t mean that it’s not the best solution.

Edit:- Now what WOULD be handy is a system that allowed concentrate / powder to be dispensed into a drinks container that you just fill with water. So you can control all the intake youself, vary the cocnetration a bit if you need to (up if you’re bonking/over hydrated, down if you’re dehydrated, the race is hotter than expected. So a bar with the concentrate dispenser system built in and dropping into a profile style system. And then make all the system removable and dishwasher safe…

3

I’d put up with a lot for a faster system, but… Water or fuel is highly indidvidual. I prefer to carry as much with me as possible, particularly for 1/2 IM or flat IM. I think that not having to deal with a crowd at a hand up and not having to risk dropping the bottle is worth the extra. On the other hand lots of people take one bottle and get lots of hand ups.

I think the best system would be some sort of nosecone/integrated HB sytem that is refillable on the fly and fairly easily removeable for cleaning.

I also think some sort of intergrated cage for a round bottle on the frame would be great. The kamm tail with a bolt on cage that completes the tail in that part of the frame would be sweet. The pointy trailing edge could hold a co2 inflator and tube maybe.

I think one big issue with tri bikes is you sell really aero bikes then leave it up to us to figure where to store our crap. We as a group carry too much crap, but an intelligent design for 2 tubes/1 tubular, a round bottle, a couple of gus, and a CO2 inflator would be a great start.

Styrrell

4

do not want.

reasons - cleaning is a hassle, refilling it on the go is a hassle, making sure it doesn’t leak when you lay the bike down, a hassle, straws are not aero, etc etc

5

I’d put up with a lot for a faster system, but… Water or fuel is highly indidvidual. I prefer to carry as much with me as possible, particularly for 1/2 IM or flat IM. I think that not having to deal with a crowd at a hand up and not having to risk dropping the bottle is worth the extra. On the other hand lots of people take one bottle and get lots of hand ups.

I think the best system would be some sort of nosecone/integrated HB sytem that is refillable on the fly and fairly easily removeable for cleaning.

I also think some sort of intergrated cage for a round bottle on the frame would be great. The kamm tail with a bolt on cage that completes the tail in that part of the frame would be sweet. The pointy trailing edge could hold a co2 inflator and tube maybe.

I think one big issue with tri bikes is you sell really aero bikes then leave it up to us to figure where to store our crap. We as a group carry too much crap, but an intelligent design for 2 tubes/1 tubular, a round bottle, a couple of gus, and a CO2 inflator would be a great start.

+1

I really like how the SC allows the speed/cadence sensors to integrate into the frame, and the trailing speedbox. IMO it makes no sense to spend tons of R&D and tunnel time on the best fork…and then zip tie a cyclometer pickup to the side of it.

Torpedo mounts seem to solve the aero issue for one bottle…one more and we’re all set.

Styrrell

6

arguably the speed concept has done exactly what you want =)

I also think some sort of intergrated cage for a round bottle on the frame would be great. The kamm tail with a bolt on cage that completes the tail in that part of the frame would be sweet. The pointy trailing edge could hold a co2 inflator and tube maybe.

I think one big issue with tri bikes is you sell really aero bikes then leave it up to us to figure where to store our crap. We as a group carry too much crap, but an intelligent design for 2 tubes/1 tubular, a round bottle, a couple of gus, and a CO2 inflator would be a great start.

Styrrell

7

It seems like a hydration reservoir like a Camelbak could be made to fit the contour of the inside of the frame. You slide the reservoir in, fill it, and drink from a tube. For cleaning you remove the reservoir and clean it like you would clean a drink system reservoir.

It wouldn’t be too tough to engineer a quick fill port of some sort to fill the system with a coventional bottle on the fly, depending on where it is in the bike.

Strong idea. Typical of you guys (Trek). You have been getting it very right the last couple years.

8

It seems there are 2 groups of triathletes out there:

  1. Packrats–wants to carry everything at the expense of speed.
  2. Speed freaks–wants to shed everything at the expense of convenience.

I feel like the SC does a good job of catering to both from what I’ve seen as far as the draft box and integrated sensors (brilliant work on the sensors btw…I would have patented it myself had you guys not done this). Trying to design a bike for one group or the other seems like a recipe for alienation of the other group, or you’d just end up with a bike so covered in water bottle mounting points that the thing would be hideous.

Now, I’d be willing to bet that the people that currently strap Speedfils or similar to their bike (i.e those that are already willing to put up with cleaning a hose/valve/reservoir) would be willing to put up with the logistics of an internal system, so the naysayers are probably anti-speedfil for the same reason they’d be anti internal hydration. Something to ponder…

Personally I’d use an internal system, but only if it was marginally more difficult to clean than a standard water bottle. I only have one bike–I use it for training and racing, so whatever solution I use has to be convenient enough to use in training, and fast enough to use in racing. So far I settled on an aero downtube bottle–the bontrager one to be specific. I feel like I’d get tired of cleaning out a complex hydration system to the point where I wouldn’t want to use it for training, but if the system were something that I could use during races only, and there were other options that I could employ during training, then that would be acceptable provided it wasn’t too difficult to switch between the training configuration and the racing configuration. So in a nutshell, I guess my willingness to tolerate an integrated system’s complexity would depend on the availability and ease of conversion to a system that would be convenient enough for training.

9

Many thanks to all who responded, here and backchannel. Seeing/hearing lots of the same things I had going on in my mind. Always fun to see different spin on the same themes.

One that didn’t make the public airwaves involves sloshing effects. Not necessarily the splashy variety, but just the sensation of a bunch of mass waving about well away from the c.g of the rest of the system. This thread was prompted as much by a recent ride eval I was doing as anything else. I hadn’t run a behind-saddle bottle system of any sort for almost 10yrs, and with one attached I was struck by how much I noticed it even during “straight and level flight.” Two oversize bottles, almost completely full (minimal airspace). I guess if that’s all you ever run then you don’t know any different or it just doesn’t bother you…but it annoyed me to no end.

Move all that, or rather half of it, up in front of my steering column ala the torpedo mount? Yes, it’s what I do to be one of the more-aero-than-you cool kids, but I’m not going to say it’s the be-all end-all. I find the SC is a much happier no-handed handler than the TTX, but I’ve also not tested that with a bottle out there. Something for the ride home today perhaps.

Main triangle mounts (2, of course) are the easy way out. No sizzle.

Next closest thing: hide it in the frame.

So right about the time I start to work through the bits and pieces of a frame-integrated bladder with plug&play functionality I run into the memories of my MTB racing years (all well before I joined Trek, btw)…when I helped Camelbak and their competition make a bunch of money by running multiple science experiments in their bladders. And those were easy to access, not so hard to clean, and with a little ingenuity weren’t impossible to dry thoroughly. I had all the tricks down…freezing them, a few drops of mouthwash or bleach, doohickeys which held the walls apart and hung them upside down, a big “clean your bag” sign left hanging on the door to greet me on my return from the trails. And I still bought and destroyed more than I care to count.

Oh, and now I have to leak-proof the system so that (more often than not) the contents of the bottle handup I’m jamming into my refill port actually end up in the reservoir instead of adding their electrolytic goodness to whatever soup I’ve already got hiding in some sumpy corner of a BB shell? At least with the external bladder only my back(-side) got wet.

Not saying it can’t be done…the how isn’t the issue (yet)…it’s the why:why-not ratio. Got some good thoughts from y’all on both sides, and it’s still coming up <1.0 to my estimation.

10

Yeah, but I still think that putting a bottle on the down tube with a custom cage that completes the airfoil would be the way to go for a bottle. If you were going to do that you might as well put the something in the pointy part behind the bottle.

Styrrell

11

As an engineer myself. You’re not going to meet all needs simulatenously. I think a design like a frontal draft box with camelbak bladder. (press fit closure) and rigid tubing might hold sway, as long as the press fit clusre could be opened relativily easily on the fly and refilled like a speedfill system. This could be mounted for or aft.you could even have a rounded center design to integrate over the fork tube to allow for more volume and an overall larger size.

I personally have stuck with my ways of 1 on the bike and 1 on the bars and during IM I put one in my jersey. (I’ve even ripped and resewn seams so they would fit. Yes I am a man and YES I can sew.

12

I realize you’re not looking for “how” but this has gotten me thinking now… What if you were to semi-integrate the system into the downtube with a recessed but removable tube system? A bottle that completes the airfoil shape such as on the P4 could be the reservoir, and you could partially recess a removable drinking tube into the TE of the downtube, then internally route it upward through the integrated front end much in the same way you would the shifter cables. If there were some way to create a guide for the tube that would allow it to be correctly placed internally as well as easily removed, that would be ideal, but I’m not sure exactly how much hollow space there is in the headtube integrated stem area to begin with…

It seems like the flow properties around the kamm airfoil would be relatively unaffected by the presence of a tube (where the tube diameter << TE thickness) only ~1/2 exposed to the air. From my understanding, the streamlines closest to the airfoil follow the contour from LE to TE, then continue on as if the airfoil had not been truncated, so in a 0 deg yaw scenario it seems like it would follow then that you could “hide” a relatively small tube there, particularly if it were recessed. Up to a yaw angle of arctan(tube diameter/TE thickness, and assuming this angle is less than the stall angle of the airfoil to begin with, it seems like the airflow might even be able to “ignore” a tube recessed in this location in crosswind scenarios as well.

13

Appreciate the brainstorming ZackC…of course now it’ll appear on the next 10 open-mold designs in 6mo… :wink:

14

I be curious to see the aero data on that. It seems reasonable that a kamm tail with a minor tube up the center wouldn’t be bad, but aero doesn’t always follow supposition. If they could put a refillable port on the fly it would be really nice, mainly because it would allow the bike to be more aero than the UCI allows for non UCI races, and would keep the water weight low. like Carl has said the feel of a bike with 2 water bottles mounted high is very different.

Styrrell

15

“Back to hydration. Take aero benefits out of the equation for a moment and help me out here: is there any other reason you who want this, want this? Or is it simply a case of willingness to put up with a little more inconvenience to get closer to what you believe is the fastest system?”

Timely post. I guess we’re about to find out.

16

Guess I am the exception. I would really like built-in front hydration. The issues of what to use are solved. Plus there really is no reason you could not use the built in front hydration with an additional water bottle between the aero bars. This also gets you both water and something else.

I do believe the system must allow you to choose to use or not use. So a cap that covers the hole is a must. Also the bladder would need to be removable. So if you had to clean it you could clean it. The straw is also going to get nasty so you need a piece, at the end, that is easily replaced. The entire straw would also need to be replaceable.

I would also ship the bike with extra straw ends.

Really appreciate you asking the question.

17

do not want.

reasons - cleaning is a hassle, refilling it on the go is a hassle, making sure it doesn’t leak when you lay the bike down, a hassle, straws are not aero, etc etc

Pretty much this exactly.

IMO, for triathletes at least, the next step in “aero hydration” is somebody coming up with a form of bottle holder that could mount to existing frames as a sort of fairing (I suppose the Wedgie is what comes to mind, something completely blocking off a part of the inner triangle) and yet accept a regular bottle (from on course) making it replaceable during the ride, which is the biggest limitation in my mind of things like the current frame mounted aero bottles.

The problem with this idea I think is that you would have to have a bulbous shape to allow you to slide a water bottle into it… although I admit when it comes to the actual aerodynamics I’m not sure that would be a negative or not…

18

Carl,

Why not use your draft box for hydration and move the junk we put in there, somewhere else. ie load the Co2 cartridges in the frame like a shotgun shell and a seat/under seat pack that is very aero.

19

Im not really interested in a hydration system, but a top tube that has a little lid on it and is just big enough to store a few little spares and a couple of gels sounds really good.

20

hey carl

I see what you did there!