Trek Bicycle is on a mission to make the world a better place to live and ride. Despite humble beginnings in a Wisconsin barn, Trek has been on the cutting edge from day one. Starting with its visionary early entry into carbon fiber bike frames, Trek’s engineering teams continue to embrace new technologies that will benefit their riders. 

According to Chad Manuell, Global Director of Engineering, Trek, “Our goal is to make only products we love. To do that, we need to have access to the best tools. Over the years, our products have become more complicated, and the tools we use have gotten more sophisticated.” 

CT scanning had been on Trek’s wish list for a long time, but the complexity and cost of legacy systems kept this vital inspection tool out of reach. Easy to use and significantly less expensive than competitors, the Lumafield Neptune scanner and Voyager analysis software made it possible for Trek to add CT to its core engineering toolkit. “When we got the opportunity to bring a Neptune in-house, we jumped on it,” Manuell said. 

The Neptune scanner and Voyager analysis software have delivered actionable insights to help Trek create products that both they and their customers love. Examining parts non-destructively with industrial CT allows Trek to understand the implementation of their designs. Larry Lardieri, Product Design Engineer, notes that “The Neptune scanner has given us the ability to look at our prototypes even more closely. It helps us investigate potential issues like adhesion, porosity, and plastic part design shrinkage.”

Using Voyager’s suite of comparative analysis tools, including CAD Comparisons, Trek can tune design and production parameters to adapt to a manufacturing process. By overlaying a CAD file on a scan of a finished physical product, Voyager computes deviation from the design and visualizes it using color maps. 

Legacy CT systems process and store data locally, usually requiring a dedicated operator and hardware system. Interacting with this invaluable data has traditionally been restricted to technicians. Lumafield's cloud-based software, however, gives engineers direct access to their scan data, and lets them share it with colleagues. Lumafield’s Voyager analysis software allows Trek engineers to easily access and share scan data, collaborate on analysis workflows, and visualize both external and internal features — all within their own web browser. Anyone using Voyager can author bookmarks, leave comments, and collaborate on analysis in real-time using Voyager’s user-friendly interface. Trek engineers also use Voyager’s high-resolution images of both 2D slice planes and 3D volumetric reconstructions for internal presentations, enabling them to solicit feedback from across teams and chart the progress of product development.

Advancing e-Bike Battery Technology

The electronics of the future are powered by lithium-ion batteries, which must be carefully integrated into products. This is especially true of products that push the limits of size, weight, and ergonomics. Trek has emerged as an industry leader in electric bikes, and its engineers are constantly innovating on battery integration.

For Trek’s eSystems team, CT scanning has emerged as a safe and effective way to inspect the details of these critical components. For batteries, destructive testing not only deprives engineers of insight but can also be dangerous. With industrial CT, Trek engineers gain deep insights into battery enclosure design, latching mechanisms, and overall performance. Voyager’s advanced dimensioning tools allow for automated measurements that can help elucidate the integrity and performance of lithium-ion batteries.

Enhancing Safety by Quantifying Impact

Rider safety is a top priority at Trek, and CT scanning provides important insights for both bike frame and helmet design by illuminating how they respond to impacts. With Neptune and Voyager, Trek engineers can comprehensively study the way impacts affect a wide variety of materials used in bike parts and helmets. 

To understand which materials and frame designs are less susceptible to everyday impacts from rock strikes and collisions, Trek engineers intentionally impact sections of bike frames and then analyze them with Lumafield’s CT scanning platform. Voyager enables engineers “to be able to do some real exact measurements of the impact site after the first hit, second hit, third hit, which allows us much more information than was previously available,”Manuell said. 

Megan Bland-Rothgeb, a Helmet Research Engineer at Trek, is able to use CT to quantify helmet impacts. This allows Trek to analyze designs to create high-performance helmets. Lumafield’s Expanded Scan Volume feature broadens the field of view on the Neptune scanner, enabling the inspection of parts that are up to 80% larger than before. Many bike helmets fall into this range and can now be fully scanned at high resolution. 

Trek’s meticulous, data-driven approach to understanding bike frame and helmet impact dynamics fuels the development of longer-lasting and more reliable products. Trek harnesses the power of Lumafield’s Neptune CT scanner and Voyager analysis software to fortify their product development process. From non-destructive testing of bike frames and parts to advancing e-bike battery integration and enhancing safety through quantifying impact, Trek is poised to advance its mission of getting more people on bikes by guiding the next phase of cycling innovation.

For more information: 

Lumafield 

CAD Comparison

Expanded Scan Volume

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