Kambiz Salari and the Aerodynamics of Trucks

Trucks waste a lot of energy overcoming the drag created by their boxy frames. Designing sleeker big rigs, though, is harder than designing sleeker airplanes given that cargo containers can’t be anything other than rectangular. Kambiz Salari puts the challenge this way: “Here is a box, and you have to somehow make it more aerodynamic, but it’s still a box.”

Salari, 53, is a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and has spent the last decade figuring out ways to make trucks slice through the air more gracefully. His research meshes with a new national imperative: The Energy Dept. awarded $115 million in grants last year to develop “super trucks” that are 50 percent more fuel efficient by 2015. Salari says we can get part of the way there—a 17 percent efficiency gain—by making relatively modest tweaks to a truck’s contours.