Truck & Off-Highway Engineering – June 2019

14 June 2019 TRUCK & OFF-HIGHWAY ENGINEERING

FROM TOP: CUMMINS; U.S. EPA

EMISSIONS CONTROL

Cleaner Trucks Initiative starts

NOx-reduction journey

The members believe that consensus
on these items will accelerate the de-
velopment of industry standards and
increase public confidence in the safe
operation of SAE Level 4 and Level 5
light-duty passenger and cargo on-
road vehicles ahead of their wide-
spread deployment.
Although the AVSC is focused on
work with the membership passenger-
car companies, there is a possibility of
consortium membership for trucking
companies and Tier 1s. The same tech-
nology that applies to passenger cars
applies to heavy trucks. But for now,
the AVSC is taking a measured ap-
proach to growth.
The Office has worked to establish
industry consortia through the SAE ITC
and engage industry OEMs and develop-
ers to build program governance, opera-
tions, and funding models. There are
active efforts to develop safety prin-
ciples and best practices that “will feed
back to the SAE committees and lead to
new standards,” Straub said. “That is
another aspect of the Office of
Automation—to sort of act as that
bridge between ITC and SAE
International.” That includes advising the
consortium and accelerating standards
and identifying the right committees and
bringing that information to them.
No one industry is leading the race to
autonomy, according to Straub. “You
are seeing a lot of advances in both of
those spaces right now. It depends who
you ask, which one will be the first
place where you see autonomy.”
There are companies working on au-
tomation for personally owned passen-
ger cars, while others are focused on
shared mobility and automated mass
transit. And, of course, a number of
companies are working on automated
trucking applications as well.
“It’s definitely a technology that’s
going to impact all modes of the trans-
portation ecosystem,” Straub noted.
“SAE is at the center of the universe
for automated vehicles,” he said. “It’s got
a lot of great people and I’m excited to
work with them all—dedicated to indus-
try and making things better.”
Jennifer Shuttleworth

The U.S. Environmental Protection

Agency (EPA) is in the beginning stag-

es of establishing new NOx regulations

for heavy-duty on-highway trucks. The

agency is spurred by advances in tech-

nology and a desire to streamline the

certification process.

The EPA last revised NOx standards

for on-road heavy-duty trucks and bus-

es in January 2001. The process that

culminated in those standards actually

started in the late 1990s. Rulemaking

takes time, both to understand technol-

ogy trends and incorporate a wide

group of stakeholders. It will take no

less time to update those NOx stan-

dards under the program called the

Cleaner Trucks Initiative (CTI), an-

nounced by the EPA in November 2018.

Why update the regulations now?

Three reasons, according to William

Charmley, director of Assessment &

Standards Division, Office of

Transportation and Air Quality at the

U.S. EPA. Emissions control technology

has improved; EPA and the industry

better understand emissions science;

and there is a desire by all parties to

streamline the certification process,

easing the regulatory burden for all.

“Both we and the industry as well as

other stakeholders have ideas about how

we can make our regulations better, using

what we have learned in the last 10 to 20

years,” he told Truck & Off-Highway

Engineering. Some of these stakeholders

include the California Air Resources

Board (CARB), who have sponsored test-

ing that also shows new technologies are

now available to reduce NOx.

“The last time the standards got more

stringent was in 2010,” said Charmley,

who is responsible for developing ve-

hicle, engine, and fuel environmental air

quality regulatory standards for all trans-

portation sources in the U.S., as well as

the development and ongoing improve-

ments to EPA’s official air pollution emis-

sions inventory forecasting model for

TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS

“One of the goals of the Cleaner Trucks Initiative

is to reduce NOx emissions under the majority, or

even all, of the in-use operating cases,” including

idle, low-load, start and stop, and creep/crawl

operations, said EPA’s William Charmley.

Engine makers are developing new technologies that further reduce both NOx and CO 2 emissions.

Shown is Cummins’ under-development concept emissions control system that combines

turbocharged air management with exhaust aftertreatment as a single close-coupled system,

together with a new rotary turbine control.