The truck of the future may well be a highly fuel efficient vehicle, possibly an electric/diesel hybrid, that is capable of capturing its energy output for feed back into its electrical system, and with advanced diagnostic and prognostic tools that will limit maintenance significantly.

Down the road in 20 or more years and trucks may flow along magnetic highways barely touching the ground, using only minimal fuel, much as fast trains do today. In fact, says Vic Suski, general manager of Shenandoah Express, Middleton, Virginia, there’s a possibility that the truck as we know it today won’t even exist.

Looking “far out,” Suski said, “the truck may not be a truck. It could be some sort of autonomous hauling device, or an autonomous vehicle running through tunnels. Some have conceived of shipping goods through container pods on pneumatic tunnels rather than via surface transportation,” added Suski, who is also a member of the Technology & Maintenance Council’s (TMC) Future Truck Committee and its Far Horizons subcommittee. TMC is an American Trucking Associations (ATA) affiliate.

Some of these visions are already on the drawing board thanks to a joint collaboration between the United States Army National Automotive Center and the TMC Future Truck committee. Paul Skalny, director of the National Automotive Center in Warren, Michigan, says the Army has committed $3.2 million over the next four years to study and validate up to 12 possible technologies that hold promise for both the military and commercial markets. 

Skalny says the following technologies offer the most immediate promise for both military and commercial trucks: advanced batteries that would make an electric vehicle feasible; technologies that promote fuel efficiency; and diagnostic/prognostic maintenance tools that promote condition-based maintenance, or the ability to determine potential parts breakdowns before they occur.

Much of Skalny’s list dovetails with TMC research goals for over-the-road, Class 8 trucks, according to members of the Future Truck committee. Both organizations will have a chance to set a research direction in late spring when they meet at the Class 8 Truck Users Forum, according to Carl Kirk, TMC Executive Director. No date or location has been set for this meeting and Kirk said no firm decisions on research goals would take place until then. However, both Skalny and TMC members expected the first joint project to center on condition-based maintenance, or what some call help maintenance.

Duke Drinkard, a retired vice president of maintenance at Southeastern Freight Lines, Columbia, South Carolina, and Far Horizons member, defines condition-based maintenance as “being able to tell when a vehicle is about to break down” by gathering ongoing information on various truck components. Although practiced, to a degree, by the airline industry, Drinkard said the trucking industry today is limited to “preventive maintenance,” which can lead to throwing away good parts “because you don’t want to pull in a truck before its next scheduled maintenance. With condition-based maintenance you know what’s failing or how much wear is left (on a given part). You get 99 percent life out of components,” saving money and avoiding breakdowns.

In time, Drinkard says, the truck’s onboard computer would be able to transmit a message from the vehicle to the driver and a remote repair location that will relate what’s wrong and exactly what part is required. Today the truck’s onboard computer only transmits diagnostics codes for a small percentage of parts, which many technicians aren’t equipped to interpret.

Progressing to condition-based maintenance requires deploying advanced sensors in strategic locations like the transmission housing that would then report on engine wear and tear. “As you move forward with this type of testing you could measure the metals in the oil to pinpoint when bearing is wearing out,” Drinkard explained.

Early versions of these tools are already deployed in some automobiles, but Drinkard said testing hasn’t taken place “to the degree that TMC and the Army want to take it. You want to be able to do more than know when the oil needs to be changed. You want to be able to tell what component is failing.”

Although of prime interest to both the private sector and military, Skalny says the Army will need far more secure networks and ruggedized computing to handle the data generated from sensors-some that will classified-than will the commercial sector. “But we have more commonality than differences. There’s a big bang for the bucks in advanced diagnostics/prognostics that allow you to see if there’s a problem before it occurs rather than during scheduled maintenance,” he said.

According to Skalny, the military has already invested heavily in advanced sensors-particularly in technologies “that know more and faster what is sensed”-along with diagnostic software and data mining tools. Some applications involve embedding sensors in tank armor to provide data “on how degraded that armor is. Then you know if you can continue the fight or not.”

Some in TMC would love to build a no-maintenance vehicle and Skalny calls that goal “utopia.” Realistically, though, the Army is working on “reliability and maintainability of components and materials,” he said.

Actually forecasting which technologies will make the future truck of 20 years out is the work of a wizard, not mere mortals. Any number of technology breakthroughs “could change the picture,” not to mention the discovery of technologies unknown today, says Suski. This hasn’t stopped Suski, and other members of TMC’s Far Horizons subcommittee from engaging in educated speculation. In fact, they say this is their charge.

Suski has been busy conjuring up what it would take to create a maintenance-free vehicle, which he considers “quite possible in the near term.” For example, he says the Army has been experimenting with nanotechnology to create metal coatings that can heal themselves. With these sorts of self-healing approaches, he says there’s the potential for trucks to go “500,00 miles without any maintenance.”    

The no-maintenance vehicle is just the beginning of potential wonder technologies that could have a major impact on the truck industry and society at large. Kirk says the military and TMC may conduct research at some time on the “elimination of parasitic horsepower losses through the electrification of trucks,” for example, or on “continuously variable transmissions,” which could “offer great promise for fleets such as Ryder, Penske, FedEx, and UPS, who operate numerous straight trucks.”

Alan Lesesky, president of Vehicle Enhancement Systems in Rock Hill, South Carolina, says in the future “all trucks, trailers and tires will be ‘smart’ down to the component level. There will be sensors all over the truck that will communicate wirelessly to (fleet terminals, etc…).” Lesesky is also chairman of the Future Truck committee’s Task Force on Future Truck Electrical and Electronic Systems subcommittee. The following are additional technologies that fleets may experience some day in some form:

Advanced Batteries. Paul Skalny, director of the Army’s National Automotive Center in Warren, Michigan, says the military is making a “major investment” in advanced, lithium-based  batteries for the military, which are key to the development of hybrid or plug-in vehicles.

Thermoelectric Generation for Fuel Economy. Both Skalny and the TMC are interested in converting a vehicle’s heat energy into electricity, or what’s called thermoelectric generation. The Argonne National Laboratory in Washington, D.C. runs a 2 Vehicular Thermoelectric Generator (TEG) program and expects to be testing this process in vehicles by 2012, according to John Fairbanks, the lab’s technology development manager for thermoelectrics. He predicts that TEG will provide “a five percent improvement in fuel economy on highway driving.” 

Also, research in aerodynamics is leading to exploration on how to harness the static electricity created as air flows around the truck as it moves along a highway, explains Drinkard. Also being explored, he says, is utilizing the truck’s braking system to generate electricity as is common in auto hybrids.

Automated Vehicles and Dedicated Highways. As automated cars make their way into the mainstream, the military is making “significant investment in robotics and unmanned systems that could lead to the evolution of the automated (trucks) and highways,” says Skalny. The military has long championed unmanned drone and weaponry, but Skalny says automated vehicles will not take hold without creation of dedicated highways with embedded technology to guide automated vehicles. 

An alternative approach is a magnetized highway that operates similarly to the fast train rail systems already in place today. Explains Drinkard, trucks could actually be pulled magnetically along the roadway “at any speed you want,” eliminating “direct burning of fuel (along magnetized routes). This would make the electric truck, with its shorter range, very viable.” Given the bureaucratic and technological complexities, Drinkard isn’t expecting to see magnetized highways for at least 20 to 50 years.

Alternative Fuels. The military is researching application of everything from advanced diesel engines to hybrid technology, and even hydrogen-fueled trucks, to meet a goal of reducing fuel usage, which Skalny says the Army considers a major priority.

Lightweight Materials. Advances in nanotechnology could create breakthroughs in the development of lightweight, though extremely durable materials, for truck bodies. Skalny envisions lightweight materials development key to fuel reduction, and of major interest to the military and commercial truck industry. 

Thermal Management and Power Conservation. Reducing the impact of extreme heat in a vehicle, along with finding ways to selectively shut down power to sections of a vehicle to free power for other purposes (think firing a weapon) is another key Army concern, says Skalny. “Lots of investment is taking place” in these sectors, which may eventually translate to commercial trucks.  wt



Contributing Editor Amy Zuckerman writes about technology as it impacts the supply chain.

Sidebar: The TMC/Army Technology Partnership

It’s a partnership made in truck heaven, or so it would seem.

The U.S. Army’s National Automotive Research Center in Warren, Michigan, conducts a wide variety of research projects on advanced truck technologies that can benefit the commercial truck industry. The industry, in exchange, can provide far more field testing of technologies than the military-roughly 100,000 miles per year for a commercial truck compared to the Army’s average 20,000 miles duty cycle.

For this reason, the U.S. Army and American Trucking Association’s Technology & Maintenance Council (TMC) have created a partnership aimed at identifying technologies applicable to both the military and commercial truck sectors. According to Carl Kirk, TMC executive director, these range from tools for “fuel economy, corrosion mitigation, diagnostics, prognostics, and an ever-changing workforce needed to maintain increasingly complex vehicles.”

For the time being, the collaboration won’t involve manufacturer input, which Kirk identified as “a distinguishing feature of the partnership.” Eventually, he said the “supplier community” would be briefed on the program’s “results and progress” with manufacturer being an “optimal scenario.”

Sidebar: RFID Standardization

What’s the use of the future truck if you can’t locate it, or the driver, should there be one?

To get the bang for the buck on a whole slew of future truck technologies means providing the tracking technology so the fleet can keep tabs on assets, its drivers and the containers it hauls. One of the most common wireless technologies used in tracking is RFID (or radio frequency identification), which can also be used to communicate information from sensors to onboard computers.

But for RFID to be of use to the future truck requires standardization, says Randy Stigall, director of emerging applications for the Finnish company UPM Raflatac. And it’s the lack of standardization, says Stigall, who is based in Cincinnati, Ohio, “that is stalling the proliferation of tagging” for everything from trucks to pallets to the goods that trucks haul.

A number of RFID-related standards are about to be published in 2009 that address Stigall’s concerns, according to Craig Harmon, president and CEO of Q.E.D. Systems, a standards-related consulting company based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Harmon is also vice chair of the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) MH10 committee for material handling.

The standards in question are intended to provide information on “where your shipment or manifest is every time you move the truck. The standards being developed track the driver, the goods, the tractor and trailer,” Harmon said. These include standards that address electronic container seals, the manifest tag, wireless ID card, the “calm network” or an onboard unit that’s used as a communications device like a radio, and the transportation worker ID card. The container ID should be approved within six months, according to Harmon.

He predicts applications of standardized RFID products will be numerous, promoting “regularity and accuracy” for common functions like advanced relay of the truck’s manifest at border crossings.