What Are Those Things on Trailers

Aerodynamics

 

They help driving in the wind..everslight fuel mileage increase...and helps keep the wind from "lifting your tandems" off the ground when lightly loaded.JMO

 

I think they are aerodynamic aids that state of CA mandates on trailers. Also, fuel is the 1st or 2nd largest expense of any trucking company, so they will usually try anything fir even a tiny reduction of fuel expense.

 

They make the owner of the truck feel good.

 

They are there to help blow the trailer sideways when the road is icy. lol

 

1 more thing the driver is supposed to check during their pre trip inspections but don't

 

A example of the finest and unnecessary liability one can bolt onto trucks per law in one of our states. (CA...)

It makes a already bad sail worse in winter when winds go across it in storms. It also complicates other situations when going off road etc for deliveries. Making sure the possibility of damage or getting stuck is a greater possibility than before.

The more you spend money to cover a big rig in BS areodynamic crap the more you demand better money saving out of it while watching your profits evaporate. If you were to examine plans to build a areodynamic truck that hardly has any space between itself and trailer and other add ons in the near future there is no point. Not when your company imposed governor holds you at 63. I can go on, but in order to get from 60 to maintain 70 you need almost twice the power against that 40 ton mass.

Finally but not least, we got 5 miles to gallon 40 years ago and we are not even getting out of 8 miles to gallon towards 9 yet. And the addition of low profile tires makes it worse. There are reasons we had the tires we had for many decades. Almost 80 years as a matter of fact.

I hate to be difficult. But I choose to be difficult. The older trucks can deliver the same load from A to B against a newer rig with all the doodads for a few dollars more in expense but very little of the BS problems and vehicle fires we endure today related to emissions and so on.

There are certain designs that I actually like and would not mind seeing however someone has to commit to building and buying these in tens of thousands before some other trucking companies will also commit. If you had a tank of water, and you split it using electric power and high school chemistry theory, you now have hydrogen which is a very good fuel and oxygen which can be used in certain cases to boost that fuel burn. Just need water and alot of it. Also there are designs that borrow from current railroad techonlogy where you can generate huge amounts of power and feed traction motors between each wheel set to move that semi. If you ever rode the Washington DC Subway railcar, its about 110,000 pounds before you add people. Then you add 4 traction motors feeding off a single 600 volt huge amounts of amperage in DC power third rail and it's pretty fast. Up to 60 without any trouble. Particularly if you hooked 8 together. We had one incident where the Metro was running 14 car trains to move people packed in like fish standing room only out of DC on the July 4th in 95 or so that night after the fireworks. we rolled out of metro center after inhaling about oh...2000+ people if not more. Thats about a 160 ton cargo if not more. And those traction motors whined quite a lot pulling out. But they got it done. Braking on the other hand was pretty touchy with that overload.

 

Those are called trailer skirts and they're made of fiberglass. Trailer skirts are supposed to aid in tractor fuel economy.

How exactly that works, I do not know. My theory is the skirts are to deflect wind from somewhere somehow.

Have I ever seen the empirical data from the tests at the wind tunnel? No.