Almost 50% of the fuel consumption of the trucks that use our highways, every hour of every day, is used in overcoming aerodynamic drag. For the operator this directly impacts profitability through fuel cost, additional noise, handling issues, emissions, and driver fatigue, but also impacts others road users, through excessive turbulence, creating challenging driving conditions, especially in rain.

Aerodynamic drag is a function of velocity, air density and frontal area of the vehicle and such is the effect of drag, as it increases exponentially with speed, that the power required to overcome it is proportional to the cube of the speed – double the speed and you need 8x the power to overcome it – it’s easy to see why there’s a lot of research going into improving truck aerodynamic efficiency!

To find out more, see the full application here