Tractor Trailer Boat tail
 

On my way in to work this morning, half a dozen tractor trailers passed me up on the highway that had no trailers attached. I believe thats called dead legging, but I could be wrong. Not know much about the truck hauling business I was wondering if these trucks return to the same spot each time they pick up a load?

If so, I thought that a large boat tail extending back from the back of the cab, attached to the kingpin and having gurney style retractable wheels would be ideal for these truckers that have to run empty on some trips ...

That alone should bump their mpg's abit ..

dead-legging
 

I think your idea would be one of the best things to ever happen in the trucking industry,although after thinking it for over thirty years,I've lost interest in it.Reality keeps intruding into my plans to change the world, and a project as ambitious as you describe well exceeds my capital limits.T.Boone Pickens could do it,not anyone I know.Bummer! This Christmas season I hope to do a small scale version of a towable boat tail behind the T-100,and drag it out to New Mexico and back to test.Much effort to make that happen.We'll see.If any one truck company were to offer such a thing in the marketplace,I think the technology would explode throughout the industry.Capital has an aversion to risk,as Bondo has discovered,trying to bring his bedcover to market.Patent attorneys and retired CEOs laughed me out of my plans back in the 1980s.As they told Preston Tucker,"little boats should stay close to shore." I don't know of any corporation that has the balls to try it.

Thanks for stroking my ego .. lol

I guess my first step would be to get a hold of some of the truck drivers I know and see who or what company may want to invest in this hair brained idea. At the fabrication of it I can handle. Living here in S. Florida I have several contacts with boat manufacturers and can have it made molded and sold from here if necessary.

I think it would look badd ass to have a rig with a boat tail hanging all the back to just a bit higher than the mudflaps. I figure without and thinking at all it would extend back 20 feet past the rig and weigh less than 1500 lbs.

Any photo chopper care to take a nice profile shot of a semi and build a Virtual boatail for me from the back of the cab to the ground using a 10 degree angle?

angle
 

trikkonceptz,get to Darin's thread for his permanent Kammback on the Metro.We created an aerodynamic template for everyone to use as a go-no-go- for streamlining.If you photo-enlarge or reduce a picture of your candidate tractor,then slip it under the template,it will show you the "curvature" you'll need for a fool-proof tail.It's not really about angles as it is curves.Without the initial curvature you'll have separation.You can also use the template to design the sidewalls as well.Pull this one off and T.Boone Pickens will be knocking on your door for cash! Good luck!

And while on this thought, why not go full out, I would figure that this boat tail would literally be a cap that would cover the rear wheels, aka Skirts, kinda like the space shuttle when it piggy backs on the jets. The awesome part it that making attach points would be so easy on the rig. I am going to contact friends I have @ Newlife & Monon, they are large companies that manufacture tractor trailer parts for the nation. Before doing so any advice on what to prepare if anything to prevent these "trusted friends" from shaking my hands and walking away with a blueprint for success?

What's sad is I was researching this to see if I am re-inventing the wheel here and all I found was a company that got money to build what they called a boat tail ... Try not to cry to hard; Ken Visser Research Page

The sad news is they saw a positive change with something so primitive. But in my opinion is so wrong on so many levels.

Patent attorneys told me I'd have no protection,even with a patent.It might buy you a little time with "patent pending",until the patent was issued,then attorneys for your competition would figure how to beat it and you'd be in a battle within 6-months.Without a quater-million dollars (1986 dollars) to pay for each infringement litigation,your ideas are all stolen and the thieves all profit from your labor.Sweet!

sad
 

What's worse,Continuum Dynamics did the same thing,got $50,000 US tax dollars,and nothing came of their work either! I wish you the best,but you're entering a realm I refuse to travel to.

Three cheers for the american freakin way !!!!

Not to worry though, If one of my ideas hits and sticks you guys can count on me to build what I consider a team of the best minds available from this pool of characters I swim with.

So long as I can pull you away from your keyboards and it doesn't take you 2 weeks to travel cross country doing 45mph in the right lane ... :turtle: LOL

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.

From what you are describing it sounds as though your idea will not fold up or be carried while the truck has a trailer. That raises the question as to how how these boat tails of yours appear where the trucks drop off their trailers and how they keep from stacking up where they pick their trailers up from. Even if your idea could fold up and be carried with a trailer trucks have weight limits and any thing that weighs 1000lbs extra isn't going to fly.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Consequently, I grew up in a Railroad family. I can say that the influential Intermodal depots would instigate a "payload only" initiative. Plus there's safety and emergency concerns. Changing a railroad's operating procedure happens every 25 years or more.

Norfolk Southern had a neat idea with the "Triple Crown" or "Roadrailer" service several years ago (still in operation on a limited basis and with Amtrak). The trailer has the ability to attach railroad trucks between the rear axles or at other attachment points, and be shipped using maritime operations (3 modes):

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...roit107_MI.jpg

In the meantime, many point-to-point, LTL, and the vast majority of intermodal services will rely on truckers to do the runs.

RH77

Like this...
 

Small truck versions hard and inflated

Attachment 1523

Attachment 1524

credit to aerohead gallery!

Well, I think this automated inflatable boat tail design is a whole lot better. There is no requirement for the driver to do anything. It automatically deploys at highway speeds. Then it stows before arriving at the dock. Its called the SmartTail by ATS. ATS Aerodynamic Trailer Systems - SmartTail and WindTamer products to reduce aerodynamic drag

http://www.ats-green.com/images/smarttailback.jpg

Smart
 

Maybe it will make a go of it in the market.
With nothing more than a cruise control logic and a potentiometer to adjust set-points,the driver shouldn't have to be bothered by it.I came up with a simple reversing valve which allows the inflation fan to do the evacuation of the
envelope.
If they would allow the lower portion to be 'bagged',they could do away with a lot of dangerous splash and spray along with additional drag reduction.
Steven Chu might dictate terms to D.O.T. and ask for resignations from anyone who doesn't want to play ball.