Rumblestrip

Rumblestrip  is a start-up company that was founded in 2016 with a focus on developing intelligent solutions which make sure that the trucks on our roads achieve the lowest possible fuel consumption, while maintaining ease-of-use for the driver. The company bases their business on the fact that, by using sensors that enable you to listen carefully to the shakes and vibrations of a vehicle, you can gain deep insights about the vehicle’s performance; the company listens to vehicles when they drive on the roads in order to develop software solutions that enhance vehicle performance.

Rumblestrip's first product - Ecosense Trailer Assist - is a fully automatic roof air deflector system that makes sure that the air deflector (which sits on the roof of a truck) is always set in the optimal position, without any user-input being necessary. The roof air deflector is the single most important component for reducing air resistance – provided it is adjusted correctly with regard to the trailer height and gap. Sadly, many trucks, in reality, drive around with incorrectly adjusted roof deflectors. The result is that haulers on average unnecessarily waste several percent of their fuel. In the worst cases, the penalty can be in excess of 10 %. This is significant in an industry where every fraction of a percent in reduced fuel consumption is chased by the engineers!

The core of the Ecosense Trailer Assist is software that analyses the configuration of the truck, as well as the aerodynamic flow field, and positions the deflector optimally at all times. To fully understand the behaviour of the flow field around different types of trucks and deflector settings, Rumblestrip's researchers perform a large number of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations on the Beskow system at PDC.

For questions about this or other PDC business partnerships, please contact business-unit@pdc.kth.se ​​​​​.