Diesel-saving device taps ORNL power

OAK RIDGE —Rarely do supercomputers and trucking find their way into the same conversation.

But a new device that improves the fuel efficiency of long-haul tractor trailers by 7-12 percent got a boost from Oak Ridge National Laboratory's computing capabilities. BMI Corp. is one of about 10 companies to use the nation's most powerful supercomputer, known as Jaguar, to help solve problems in private industry.

Developed by BMI, a start-up transportation technology company based in Greenville, S.C., the device attaches to the undercarriage and rear top of the trailer, narrowing and channeling the flow of air to reduce the normal turbulence of an 18-wheeler traveling down the highway.

Demand for efficiency improvements in the trucking business is being driven by a California mandate to improve trucking mileage by at least 5 percent, and the product could save the 1.3 million trucks on the road about 1.5 billion gallons of diesel and $5 billion per year, according to an ORNL statement. Long-haul trucks have an average fuel economy of six miles per gallon.

Thanks to Jaguar, development of the product, which has been certified by the Environmental Protection Agency, was shortened from three years to 18 months, said BMI CEO Mike Henderson, who connected with the lab on the advice of a former colleague at Boeing, where Henderson was once an executive.

'A truck is complicated. When you take an aerodynamic shape and test it, there are a lot of changes that occur,' Henderson said. Without the access to ORNL computing power, 'the quality wouldn't have been there,' he said. 'And, of course, the ability to get answers in a brief amount of time.'

Current truck design creates an air stream that is wider than the truck itself and tends to be unstable, he explained. BMI's product directs and streamlines the truck's wake, using several attachable pieces fitted before and between and behind the rear set of trailer wheels, atop the back and — in an upgrade option that allows trucks to reach the 12 percent efficiency improvement mark — flanking its rear. Not only does the product improve efficiency, it also makes the rig more stable, Henderson said.

'Lo and behold, it takes less than half the amount of driver motion to keep it steady,' he said. 'We really didn't realize it would be that big of an effect.'

In production since October, the product has won a 'Top 20' product award from Heavy Duty Trucking magazine and sales are ramping up quickly, Henderson said. He expects that current production of 150 systems per month will increase to 1,000 per month by this time next year.

The company recently has started a second project that will use Jaguar to help design trucks and trailers from scratch, an effort that could potentially result in 18 wheelers that are 30 percent more efficient than those on the road today, Henderson said.

'We're going to take it to full optimization, where the computer makes the changes (in design),' he said. 'We've started the preliminary work right now.'

The project is a good example of what the lab was hoping to accomplish with a program launched in 2009 to help industry tap into 2.3 petaflops in computing power to solve particularly troublesome problems. A petaflop is a thousand trillion operations per second.

'What's been exciting about it is we've had small start-up companies, and we've had Fortune 500 companies,' said Suzy Tichenor, director of ORNL's industrial partnerships program in computing and computational sciences.

The lab seeks unique projects that would particularly benefit from high-powered computing and also align with ORNL's areas of research focus.

'This is not a center where you bring production work. The problems that come here are … something that a company would never be able to attempt with its own computing power,' she said. '(The BMI project) was a really nice fit in a sweet spot.'

Larisa Brass is a freelance contributor to the News Sentinel.