A student initiative to alleviate poverty in a war-torn African country has morphed into hands-on learning and real-life design projects for two groups of Bucknell University engineering students.

This started in 2009 when Bicycles Against Poverty visited northern Uganda to distribute bicycles to people in Gulu.

The bikes provide recipients with life-improving transport opportunities — from the ability to earn an income by ferrying passengers, transporting farm produce to market and fetching distant water.

Muyambi Muyambi, the civil engineering and economics sub-senior who founded Bicycles Against Poverty, returned to Bucknell campus with ideas to make the bicycles more useful.

Could a bike’s power be harnessed in a way to grind grain? Could a lightweight, but durable trailer be built and attached to a bike to increase the load?

Charles Kim, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and two groups of students are working to answer these questions.

The group is developing a bicycle-powered grinder that can be attached to a bike via a pulley mechanism to grind sorghum and millet.

Grinding flour for dinner takes about two hours while the bicycle-powered grinder takes 10 minutes.

Key design considerations for building such a device come cheaply with readily available materials in Uganda.

Kim envisioned a village sharing a grinder which would be put in a centralised location so that many people could have access to it.

“You can buy a stand for $200 (about sh400,000) but a bike costs $75 (about sh150,000) which does not make economic sense.” Kim said. “We are making our own stand for $20 ( about sh40,000). The big challenge is to keep the cost low enough to make it an attractive option,” he adds.

Seniors Grant Parseghian, Adam Andersen, Brandon Fox and Tim McClees have made substantial progress in designing a lightweight trailer that can be attached to a bicycle to increase the load a bike carries.

Parseghian demonstrated a metal clamp attached to the rear frame of a bicycle and is connected to a railed flat-bed trailer via a heim joint. The joint gives the trailer three degrees for turning and rising on uneven surfaces.

Bicycles Against Poverty plans to return to Uganda in early August. If a senior design project team is successful, the grinder will not be the only thing the group will bring.
Bucknell University