Tractor Trailer Boat tail

[trikkonceptz]

Originally Posted by ConnClark

Where they are right and you are wrong is that their solution is light cheap and simple to build and retrofit. It also can be attached and removed easily as well as fold away for storage.

What they did was throw crap against a wall and saw what stuck. It is cheap and ineffective and if you saw some of the road test photos, held on with ratchet straps. Please, whether or it was intentional those comment you made are an insult to the intelligence of anyone trying to make a small bit of difference in this world. What you think you know about what I want to build is what I am leading on, I know what logistical problems lie ahead of me because I have several years or experience working in the industry of tractor trailers.

I however am not dumb enough to lay out a step by step description of what is a viable solution to these rolling bricks so any lurker can have at it to an idea or ideas collaborated by more intelligent individuals. So while I apreciate the devils advocate prospective, you may actually be reading a post from the devil himself who holds his own ideas to a much more stringent standard.

But to answer you directly, Boat tails for tractors or trailers can be designed so they do not become a hazard to a docking facility. The trick is this products cannot be made as a generalized solution, rather catered to the needs of the truck and / or facility. Once you take the time to analyze the use of the rig and where it docks/parks variation to a basic design will conform to the enviroment. Weight is always an issue with trucks, however no one have ever addressed weight reduction to compensate for aerodynamic advancements. Who knows in my idealistic view of world we may be able to get ammendments passed to weght restrictions so long as they are documented aerodynamic improvements to help the overall efficiency of the machine.

This area is in such an infant stage I am gitty at the thought of tackling the problem, not of future design, but of retrofit because of its impact on the industry.

[ConnClark]

Originally Posted by trikkonceptz

What they did was throw crap against a wall and saw what stuck. It is cheap and ineffective and if you saw some of the road test photos, held on with ratchet straps. Please, whether or it was intentional those comment you made are an insult to the intelligence of anyone trying to make a small bit of difference in this world. What you think you know about what I want to build is what I am leading on, I know what logistical problems lie ahead of me because I have several years or experience working in the industry of tractor trailers.

ummmmm..... Use of computational fluid dynamics and wind tunnel testing isn't just throwing crap against the wall. Proof of concept prototypes rarely look professional or beautiful they are just built to demonstrate or test a concept. This prototype did so beautifully. I have worked in R&D for over ten years. An Optimal solution to one problem is rarely a practical one when other problems are taken into consideration.

I however am not dumb enough to lay out a step by step description of what is a viable solution to these rolling bricks so any lurker can have at it to an idea or ideas collaborated by more intelligent individuals. So while I apreciate the devils advocate prospective, you may actually be reading a post from the devil himself who holds his own ideas to a much more stringent standard.

Peer review in early stages is an easy way to get ahead. It is a shame you reject it.

But to answer you directly, Boat tails for tractors or trailers can be designed so they do not become a hazard to a docking facility. The trick is this products cannot be made as a generalized solution, rather catered to the needs of the truck and / or facility. Once you take the time to analyze the use of the rig and where it docks/parks variation to a basic design will conform to the enviroment. Weight is always an issue with trucks, however no one have ever addressed weight reduction to compensate for aerodynamic advancements. Who knows in my idealistic view of world we may be able to get ammendments passed to weght restrictions so long as they are documented aerodynamic improvements to help the overall efficiency of the machine.

This area is in such an infant stage I am gitty at the thought of tackling the problem, not of future design, but of retrofit because of its impact on the industry.

you may be a little late

http://www.marama.org/diesel/frieght...DCAeroOvw2.pdf

[trikkonceptz]

Cmon, do you really think I'm inventing this stuff? At least you found a well thought out list of enhancements.

Are you familiar with the company or document on a more in depth level than finding it via Google? I ask because no where in the report / proposal does it cover hard numbers done with testing. Meaning over the road tests.

I know its unfair to compare passenger vehicles with these monsters, but those gains seem a tad conservative for what they do. Take any of those mods the boat tail for example and apply it to a vehicle and the gains will be greater than 5%.

This change in our attitudes of it is what it is will only be changed one of two ways; By government mandate (Unlikely), or through grass roots involvement educating one at a time. This example you gave is it a positive start to solving that issue, but I would be encouraged to try several alternatives that I feel would be marked improvements on what I saw in the document.

Unlike the passenger car market, which is getting smarter by the day, the trucking industry is old school and driven by individuals who quite frankly felt this is the best way to provide themselves with a comfortable life. Most truck drivers are not skilled laborers. Therefore educating them and their superiors on how to save money is the key and the most difficult piece of this puzzle.

So I hope to be able to take this type of challenge head on and succeed where others have failed, I hate low lying fruit and this seems to be a great industry to make a difference in.

[ConnClark]

here is the company website

SOLUS - Products and Inventions for Fuel Economy

they have a lot of resources and some PHDs from nasa.

here is some testing results from 2003 that were in an SAE paper
http://www.solusinc.com/pdf/2003-01-3377.pdf

Also they did some full scale windtunnel testing

http://www.solusinc.com/sorhtmodel.html

Of course some of their numbers are conservative. They are out to make money as a business off of other businesses that have tight margins. Any claims they make have to deliver or it will sour the whole market.

[mwpiper]

1. Publishing an idea for an invention on a public forum essentially nullifies the patent claim. If you want to patent something, you need to keep it close to your chest until filed.

2. Fuel efficiency is not the only factor in a truck. Weight is an issue. The heavier the truck, the less payload it can carry because there is an absolute maximum weight. Size is an issue. Trailers are boxes because they fill the legally mandated maximum dimensions. If you streamline a trailer, they can't carry as much. I used to work at UPS during college and I filled those d@mned things to the roof from front to back.

3. If your fairing is only used when bobtailing, where does it go when a trailer is picked up? Their not cruising for the scenery. They are going someplace to pick up a trailer so they can make money. If they drop off the fairing, who gets it back to its original location? You've created a whole new logistics tail requiring flatbed trucks to move the fairings around. This can only be considered by major fleet operators and has to be proven to be cheaper than buying more fuel. It is useless to the owner-operators.

The big tractor manufacturers have come a long way in terms of aerodynamics over the old cubical cab over design that was ubiquitous during the '70s. But trailers are boxes. This will be even more difficult to deviate from as more and more trailers are actually shipping containers. Actually, the real solution for truck fuel efficiency is not aerodynamics but more shipping containers. Getting trucks out of the long haul business in favor of containers on trains and even barges and coastal ferries would be much more efficient.

[instarx]

I grew up in a trucking family and although there may be regional terminology differences, "dead heading" (not dead legging) is traveling anywhere without a paying load. You can have a trailer attached. What you saw is called a bob-tailing, as mwpiper pointed out. The cab itself is called a bob-tail when it is driven without a trailer. It can also be a verb such as "Bob-tail over to XYZ Company and pick up our trailer." or "I'm going to drop my trailer here and bob-tail home for Thanksgiving."

I agree with mwpiper 100%, the solution for using trucks efficiently is to keep them local or even regional. Trains offer much more efficent transportation for products over long distances.

I have always thought that a bunch of "truck-trains" would make sense. Trucks with tractors would be driven onto a train, the drivers would retire to the lounge/sleeping car to travel in comfort to a hub near their final destination. The trucks would then be driven off the train and head for the factory docks.

This would combine the best of both worlds of trucks and trains. It makes no sense to drive a truck and trailer 3,000 miles cross-country to deliver a single trailer of whatever. The thing that keeps so many trucks on the road doing just that is that it employs a lot of people. However, switching over to containerized freight using trains would cause a lot of unemployment. The truck-train would keep truck owner/operators employed, make life easier for them, reduce their costs, and save fuel/energy. I bet a lot of truckers would like to pay $1,000 to get cross-country on a train than $2,000 in diesel fuel AND do all that driving.

[MazdaMatt]

in trucking, time = money. When someone calls you up and says I need a half trailer moved from NYC to LA in 4 days. You don't have time to schedule pickup, delivery to train, wait for next train out of town, rail time, pick up at train station and deliver to customer. You get the freight and you take it where it has to go and you bill the customer through the nose for your troubles. My father's company makes good on long-haul service because it is fast, simple and secure.

As for the boat tail. Make it cheap, make it dependable, make it DEAD SIMPLE to use. There is a new era of truckers entering the business and these people don't want to get out of their seats to sign the bill. You can't expect them to crawl all over the rig to set up a big contraption to save the company they work for a little gas. They'd rather get on the road and make the next pickup/delivery for their "per drop" pay.

Sell it for 3k, install it in 5 hours, deploy it in 5 minutes or don't bother coming to market.

[instarx]

Well, I think there are very few cross-county loads that the shipper says absolutely has to be there in 4 days, and when he does he pays for it - but that isn't typical.

I may not have explained my concept very well - the driver would not have to load his truck onto the train and then find another train to take - the drivers' car would be part of the same train - he'd get there the same time his truck did. He'd then just drive it off. This is the way the Channel Tunnel works.

Nothing is truer than saying time is money for truckers, because there isn't enough of it to squeeze in enough paying loads to make a profit. If it takes three days to get cross-country on a truck-train, and the driver gets to charge the shipper the same amount, and it costs him less than the fuel would have cost, that's lot's of extra time for more loads, and more profit per load as well. Plus, ONE driver could do it on a truck-train, so the expense of a co-driver isn't needed.

If a driver saved one day per cross-country trip and did that four times a month (once a week, doable), that would be 48 DAYS of extra road-time every year available for making money.

But I think we're getting away from aerodynamics and into the economics of freight-hauling.

[Whoops]

I am absolutely baffled by the fact that trikkonceptz posed a question, which I fell Aerohead answered very simply and then trikkonceptz is peoed because everyone gave him feedback he didn't want to hear.

trikoncepts; if you didn't want to hear the phenomenal feedback you got, then you shouldn't have posted and asked.

[woohoo207]

primitive maybe... but the feds also mandate that any aerodynamic extention from the rear of the trailer be less than five feet. The plates that are sold for the rear of the trailer mimic optimal pressure angles for normal highway speeds and are are easy and quick for drivers to fold back for docking while also being relatively cheap.

Automation would definetely be easier and quicker for the driver but many trucking companies look to their competition for examples, and will not pay for the expense of such a system when no one else is doing it and margins are so slim.

But back to trikkoncepts point... There is a lot of room for improvement for transport vehicles. And as far as trucks driving without trailers, the aerodynamics must be horrible.

pneumatic balloon boattail anyone? This seems to be the easiest way to get the ideal geometry- but the high volume air pump might prove expensive.