Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - April 2018 - 2

EDITORIAL
Bill Visnic
Editorial Director
Bill.Visnic@sae.org

EDITORIAL

Ryan Gehm
Editor-in-Chief
Ryan.Gehm@sae.org
Lindsay Brooke
Senior Editor
Lindsay.Brooke@sae.org

'Heavy' topics on tap for WCX18

Jennifer Shuttleworth
Associate Editor
Jennifer.Shuttleworth@sae.org

Another April, another SAE World
Congress Experience-the organization's
flagship event (wcx18.org). A time when
global mobility experts descend on Cobo
Hall in Detroit to share insights and innovations on any and every conceivable
topic related to automotive engineering.
A notable example, the Connect2Car
track (www.sae.org/attend/connect2carwcx/attend) covers pressing issues related to automated driving, smart cities,
cybersecurity, regulatory developments
and policies-and Kirigami optics. This
program takes on more immediacy, certainly, following the recent fatal collision
in Arizona involving an Uber autonomous
vehicle and a pedestrian (see page 44).
As past participants and attendees
know full well, WCX is not strictly an
automotive event. Connect2Car is just
as relevant to heavy trucks as it is passenger vehicles. Engineers and executives who develop commercial vehicles,
off-highway and military machines, as
well as the critical systems and components that drive them, present their
technical know-how alongside that of
their automotive colleagues.
Take for example, SAE's High-Efficiency
IC Engine Symposium (www.sae.org/
attend/high-efficiency/attend), which
precedes WCX on April 8-9, at the Westin
Book-Cadillac Hotel a short distance from
Cobo. A session on "Advanced Heavyduty Concepts" sees experts from
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) and
Volvo Group Trucks Technology presenting on high-efficiency engines for longhaul trucks and the impact of emissions
regulation on technology development.
Organic Rankine cycle-based waste
heat recovery (WHR) systems have been
developed to a near production-ready
state, but still suffer from a poor cost/
benefit tradeoff, according to SwRI's Tom
Briggs, one of the presenters. One promising path to dramatically increase the efficiency of WHR-increasing the power
output while maintaining or reducing system cost-is to transition to a supercritical
CO2 system. The thermodynamic properties of supercritical CO2 are "ideally suited"

Lisa Arrigo
Custom Electronic
Products Editor
Lisa.Arrigo@sae.org

2 April 2018

to WHR on a heavy-duty engine, and cycle analysis suggests that a realized system could have twice the efficiency of an
ORC, the session program teases.
At WCX proper, advanced propulsion
sessions devoted to heavy-duty dot the
event program. "Advances in NOx
Reduction Technology" will be of high
interest, particularly with ultra-low NOx
emissions standards for trucks looming.
Also of note is a panel discussion, on April
10, titled "Medium-Duty and Heavy-Duty
Vehicle Efficiency Opportunities through
the Co-Optimization of Fuel and Engine
Technologies." Topics covered will include
conventional mixing controlled combustion, advanced kinetically controlled combustion strategies, and potential synergies
with electrification of vehicle powertrains.
Platooning is another hot topic at
WCX. Lawrence Livermore National Lab
researchers present results of scaled
wind-tunnel tests to investigate the aerodynamic benefits of heavy-vehicle platooning. LLNL designed and fabricated a
wind-tunnel platform to test truck platoons up to three vehicle configurations
with separation distances between 5 and
320 ft (1.5 and 97.5 m) full-scale. The
platform accounts for crosswind effects
on the drag force and cooling air supply
for yaw angles ranging from -15° to 15°.
And Volvo Group, along with several
research organizations, evaluated cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC),
using wireless vehicle-vehicle communication to augment radar sensor data, on a
three-truck platoon on a closed test track.
Inter-vehicle gaps ranged from 3.0 s or 87
m (285 ft), to 0.14 s or 4 m (13 ft). The
middle truck saved the most fuel at gaps
shorter than 12 m (39 ft) and the trailing
truck saved the most at longer gaps, while
the lead truck saved the least at all gaps.
Scanning the tech-session speaker
lineup reveals a host of other familiar
names: Caterpillar Inc., CNH Industrial,
Cummins, Eaton, Hino Motors, John
Deere Power Systems, Navistar, U.S.
Army TARDEC-a veritable Who's Who
of the heavy on- and off-highway sectors.
Ryan Gehm, Editor-in-Chief

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TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING
http://www.wcx18.org https://www.sae.org/attend/connect2car-wcx/attend https://www.sae.org/attend/connect2car-wcx/attend http://www.sae.org/attend/high-efficiency/attend http://www.sae.org/attend/high-efficiency/attend
Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - April 2018

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