A GREAT DECADE IS COMING

January 5, 2011 Vol. 7, No. 1

Wow, can't believe I'm launching the seventh volume of this e-newsletter, this quasi-blog, this thing that's really just an expression of my fascination with the technology of trucking. And I have every reason to think it will endure because we're now in the first year of a decade that will, I think, produce more innovation than we've seen in many years.

The last decade, after all, was largely consumed by efforts to meet three increasingly stringent levels of emissions control. Not enough resources for huge innovation on other fronts. Hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and billion of dollars later, we have big diesels that do indeed spew out many fewer bits of carbon and whiffs of nitrogen oxide. It's quite remarkable.

You know there's a 'but' coming.

But we're only now starting to claw our collective way back to the fuel economy we knew and loved 10 years ago, in 2001. Truck operators have paid that bill, one that's entirely too large for me to comprehend, let alone calculate. Billions of dollars spent to make diesels cleaner, maybe more billions spent on burning extra fuel as a result.

Sensible? Nah.

I've never been able to balance these particular books, even less so now that Washington -- with Ottawa in lock step -- has decreed that another miracle must be achieved to counteract the last one. An across-the-board fuel-efficiency gain of something like 20% by 2018. And the suits even admit that they don't have a clue as to how that target will be met. Publicly, no less, they've said that they simply trust the engineers to pull it off. Yet they haven't expressed any concern publicly, and I'd bet not privately either, for the poor truck buyer who'll be paying yet again for new technologies of one stripe or another.

Can the engineers do it? Sure, of course they can, given enough investment. Diesel engineering has become a very sophisticated enterprise, of necessity, at least as far as air- and fuel- and exhaust-management systems are concerned, and the folks who used to have many pens and a slide rule sticking out of their shirt pockets already know of one solution: waste-heat recovery.

That won't be needed 'til mid-decade because there's general agreement that existing technologies can get us to about 2014 with no sweat -- and essentially no extra expense for the buyer. After that, who knows? Capturing waste exhaust heat and turning it back into horsepower is at this point just a clear possibility, but nobody says it's a given.

AND WHAT ELSE IS COMING? Well, the list is nearly endless, many examples coming from the safety side of things where legislation will yet again play a role. We've got a stopping-distance mandate, and I'd guess a roll-stability-control demand isn't far behind, for example.

And manufacturers may once again have the resources required by innovation. I'm not about to declare the recession over as others have done -- the damage incurred was too big, and some of it was structural -- but it's clear that truck sales are up, and that means research-and-development dollars will soon be available again.

ACT Research has a pretty rosy picture painted, reporting this week that
December preliminary net orders of heavy-duty Class 8 commercial vehicles for North American markets were 25,500 units, an increase of 115% compared to December of 2009.
 
“The industry closed 2010 with a string of three strong months of net orders. With nearly 71,000 orders booked, the fourth quarter was the best quarter for Class 8 vehicles since the second quarter of 2006,” said Kenny Vieth, president and senior analyst at ACT. “The ramp-up in demand is consistent with the upcycle we have been forecasting for over a year and confirms production levels will increase significantly in 2011."

Encouraging, eh?

AS WE MOVE FURTHER INTO THE DECADE it's a safe bet to say that the price of diesel will rise, as will environmental concerns, so there will be increasing pressure to find other fuels. Natural gas is an obvious option, and already making serious headway in some applications, but there will be an enormous amount of work done on non-crop-based biofuels. That's already the case, especially in Europe.

The European Union has promised to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 20% before 2020 – increasing that figure to 30% if other countries also toughen their eco-targets. Don't hold your breath on that latter point, especially as the demand for oil is skyrocketing in China and to a lesser extent India. In neither country is there yet any evidence of serious environmental concern.

But in Europe one fuel in particular seems to be gaining a lot of traction: an entirely new type of biofuel called dimethyl ether, or DME.

It's the focus of a unique development project joining together the EU, the Swedish Energy Agency, Danish chemicals specialist Haldor Topsoe, fuel giants Total and Preem and biofuel producer Chemrec, among others like Volvo. The latter has several trucks running on DME, like the one pictured here, and that group includes a hybrid-electric garbage truck in actual service.
 

DME is a gas that's transformed into a liquid under low pressure, which makes it relatively easy to handle. It's actually used today for a variety of purposes like the propellant in spray-cans, as a fuel in cigarette lighters, and as a base chemical in the production of plastics. It can be produced both from natural gas and from a variety of biomass sources, in which case it is known as Bio-DME.

It provides an efficiency rating as high as that of an ordinary diesel engine, but a lower noise level, which is especially important in Europe and will increasingly be an issue in North America. The combustion process produces no soot, so a far simpler exhaust aftertreatment can be used. What's more, a DME-fuelled engine is said to produce higher start-up torque, thus improving driveability.

Transport Canada approves of DME as a motive fuel, incidentally, and produced a brief report on its viability. Here's a little of what the feds have to say about it:

"The injector pressure is much lower than diesel but much higher than that found in current liquid propane systems used in spark ignited engines. The technical issues concerning fuel system design arise from poor fuel viscosity, poor lubricity, and incompatibility with most elastomers. DME has a lower vapour pressure than propane and therefore propane tanks can be used. This would also facilitate mixtures of DME and propane. As expected there are no standards regarding DME fuel systems.

"No major hurdles were identified in the use of DME as a fuel for compression ignition engines. Additional studies and research will be required in all the areas prior to arriving at a commercial product. It is recommended that work be started to find a suitable odorant for use in leak detection."

THE GOOD OLD HYBRID remains a favorite of mine, and as I said in my last Product Watch, I think it's a technology that's going places in the first part of this new decade. Possibly even in over-the-road heavy trucks but certainly in urban and regional machines. Vocational trucks such as the Freightliner M2e pictured here and plain-vanilla delivery vehicles alike.

The stumbling block in the commercialization effort is price, of course, and there are no bargains to be had in the hybrid world. Government incentives will be required in the short term, but I feel we're on the cusp here and by 2015, assuming even a relatively modest rise in diesel prices, I'd guess there will be a justification case easily made on the basis of reasonably quick payback times in the 3- to 4-year range. And much less in some applications.

For the hybrid-electric variation, battery costs are a serious burden. They can cost upwards of $20,000 but that price could come down -- and operational simplicity could be enhanced -- if there was some commonality between battery technologies. For the most part, lithium-ion chemistry is the preferred answer, but there's lithium ion and then there's lithium ion. We're not talking about a universal technology here.

In fact, GE Global Research, General Electric’s central technology development arm, recently announced an interesting dual-battery answer that, it claims, could help accelerate the electrification of bus fleets, delivery trucks and other larger, heavy-duty vehicle fleets. 

The GE team successfully demonstrated a dual-battery system on a zero-tailpipe-emissions transit bus that pairs a high-energy-density sodium battery with a high-power lithium battery.

One of the keys in the GE technology is that each type of battery in this dual setup does what it does best.

Most types of batteries today come with a trade-off between power and energy storage. Lithium batteries, for example, provide a lot of power for acceleration but aren't optimized to store energy. That means range is limited. Sodium batteries are on the opposite side of the spectrum, able to store large amounts of energy but less optimized for power. In the hybrid transit bus demo, the lithium battery focused on power-intensive acceleration and braking, while the sodium battery provided an even electric power flow to extend range. 

Another key feature here is that the solution is scalable.

“With heavier vehicle platforms, both energy storage and power are at a premium to deliver optimal vehicle performance, but the exact needs can vary based on a vehicle’s size and drive cycle. The beauty of our dual battery system is that it can be scaled to deliver just the right combination of power and storage,” explains Lembit Salasoo, senior electrical engineer and principal investigator on the hybrid bus project at GE Global Research.

“We’re entering a decade of unprecedented activity and developments in electrified transportation,” he added, supporting my thesis at the outset.

I'll let that be the last word here.

WELL, LAST BUT ONE. The sharp-eyed amongst you will realize that I'm a week early with this episode of Gizmo Follies. I've changed the schedule so that I can avoid a cluster of demands on my time at mid-month, every month. Lord knows why it's taken me all these years to make such a simple switch, but there ya go. Never said I was smart.

So here I am writing on the 5th, and the next Product Watch e-newsletter will be shipped out on the 19th. I'll maintain the 2-week spread. In the comprehensively unlikely event that this makes a difference to any of you, I'm deeply, deeply sorry.

THIS NEWSLETTER IS PUBLISHED every two weeks. It's a heads-up notice about what's going on with trucking technology as well as what you can see at  www.todaystrucking.com where you'll find in-detail coverage of nearly everything   that's new. Plus interesting products that may not have had the 'air play' they deserved within the last few months. Why not subscribe today?

I should remind you that I don’t endorse any of the products I write about in this e-newsletter, nor do I have the resources to test them. What you’re getting is reasonably well educated opinion based on three decades in trucking. And in the case of the individual product items, I’m just presenting simple news from the manufacturer or service provider, with the hyperbole mostly removed and   clarification applied.

If you have comments of whatever sort about Product Watch, or maybe you've tried a gizmo I should know about, please contact me at rolf@newcom.ca.

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MICHELIN PHONE APP

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SCALE FINDER iPHONE APP

(January 05, 2011) -- CAT Scale now offers a free locator app

CSA DRIVER HANDBOOK

(January 05, 2011) -- J. J. Keller Introduces an on-the-road CSA reference for drivers

BODY BUILDER BOOK

(January 05, 2011) -- Western Star's new online resource provides comprehensive component information