Special Topics in Sports Engineering 2021

Over the last two weeks Master students has taken part in an intensive special topics course hosted by TU Delft in the Netherlands, bringing together students from around Europe studying Sports Engineering.

Special Topics in Sports Engineering is an inter-university course for Master students in Mechanical Engineering, Movement Sciences, Sport Sciences, and other related MSc programs. The course is organized as a two-week intensive course and comprises lectures, demonstrations, practicals, hands-on research, and a final field test. The course will be taught by staff from the six participating universities. Due to the ongoing coronavirus situation, this year's course will again be online.

The course is organised around a basic theme relevant for sports engineering and this year's theme will be "Maximizing cycling performance". During the course students will work out what aspects determine cycling performance, and collect data (through experiments or literature research) that are needed to develop and feed a simulation program for the estimation of the optimal bicycle–rider combination and the maximal performance humanly possible. The course's final activity will be a test ride to quantify the differences between actual performance and predicted performance.