POWER PARTNERS WITH TRAILERS BEING INVOLVED IN CARRYING MORE THAN 70 PER CENT OF AMERICA’S FREIGHT, SUSTAINABILITY INNOVATIONS CAN MAKE A HUGE IMPACT. RESEARCHERS AT INDIANA’S PURDUE UNIVERSITY KNEW THEY HAD SOME GOOD IDEAS, BUT THEY NEEDED A TRAILER.
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hen you need a trailer for research purposes, you can’t get any luckier than Purdue University engineering researchers. The largest trailer manufacturer in the United States just happened to be a 15-minute drive away. The engineers took advantage of the opportunity and have teamed up with Wabash to investigate an experimental trailer that recaptures its own electricity from vibrations, heat and airflow. The donated trailer is part of a three-year collaborative research project between Wabash, which is headquartered in Lafayette, Indiana, and Purdue University’s College of Engineering. The trailer was recently showcased at an open house at Purdue’s Herrick Labs, where the first experiments are taking place. Michael Bodey, the Director of Technology Discovery and Validation at Wabash, said the goal is to find cost-efficient sustainability solutions that also take advantage of the available waste energy from both vehicle movement and payload. That usable energy, he said, could be used for things like propulsion, lights and electric TRU systems. “When you think of a trailer in transport, the weight and speed of the system itself have a lot of potential energy available from the sheer motion of the trailer,” Bodey explained. “Now, if you add in all the different factors that would affect how much energy could be collected – the wind going around it, the amount that it takes to start and stop, the natural
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James Gibert and his team of researchers will turn this Wabash-donated trailer into a rolling laboratory. Image: Purdue University photo/Jared Pike.