This article seems very light on equations and calculations, and would be greatly enhanced by including them.
Happy to explain the math in more detail, but the code is -- I think -- pretty self-explanatory.
Edit to add: this function doesn't calculate the initial lift to the higher orbit; that'd be the difference between the speed of your circular orbit and the perigee speed at the higher orbit.
If you're at one of either the closest- or farthest- points, at distance r, and the opposite one is s, this reduces to
(defun speed-at (r s)
(sqrt
(- (/ 2.0 r)
(/ 2.0 (+ r s)))))
And; if you have an orbit burn at one of these points that's co-linear with your direction of motion—something that simply expands or contracts the periapsis or apopasis, as is the question here—then velocity addition is a one-dimensional scalar sum. Concretely: if you're in an orbit defined by the peri- and apo- distances (r,s), and you want an orbital maneuver, at r, that either increases or decreases the opposite distance from s to s*, the Δv you need is (defun Δv (r s s*)
(abs (- (speed-at r s)
(speed-at r s*))))
That's all the math needed for calculating delta-v's for the maneuvuers in the OP post. I.e., the Hohmann transfer between two circular orbits, of radius r1 and r2, is (defun Δv-hohmann (r1 r2)
(+ (Δv r1 r1 r2) ;; at r1, raise apoapsis r1 -> r2
(Δv r2 r1 r2))) ;; at r2, raise periapsis r1 -> r2
And the bielliptic transfer is a sequence of three of these. I think it's (defun Δv-bielliptic (r1 r2 r-inter)
(+ (Δv r1 r1 r-inter)
(Δv r-inter r1 r2)
(Δv r2 r-inter r2)))
(I've left out the dimension-ful scaling factors; if you want a concrete calculation for a real object, you can scale everything throughout (inside the roots) by G*M, which is i.e. 398600 [km^3/s^2] for Earth).Including illustrative numbers on the diagram in the article would be helpful to show the difference.