by Mike Gibson
While the twin objectives of reducing fossil fuel pollutants and lessening U.S. dependence on foreign oil lie at the heart of many of its programs, the NTRC is also home to research projects diversely aimed at finding new methods of predicting traffic flow, improving the inventory-tracking technologies used by shipping companies, and promoting vehicular crash safety.
"We call this guy The Crusher," engineer Ed Grostick says with a laugh, pointing up at a foreboding chamber slightly bigger around than a phone booth but towering nearly 20 feet in the air. Crusher's given name is actually TMAC, which stands for Test Machine for Automotive Crash-worthiness.
With a pair of opposing vertical parts that work in much the same fashion as a huge drill press, TMAC allows researchers to simulate the impact of automobile crashes at up to 18 miles per hour, and to determine via computer modeling how the net energy of an actual collision would be distributed through the body of a vehicle.
On a table next to Crusher sits an array of post-test subjects—fiberglass tubes recast as big blossoms, their sides split and curled back like petals; metal pipes mushroomed by the force of one of Crusher's blows. Funding for this research comes from both the Department of Energy and from individual parts manufacturers anxious to determine the soundness of their wares.
In another part of the NTRC building, the University of Tennessee Asphalt, Infrastructure and Materials Lab employs a series of special ovens and mixers to produce asphalt samples of varying consistency, samples which are then tested through exposure to extremes of heat and pressure.
And in yet another lab, a program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense seeks to expand the application of so-called "smart tags"—small and inobtrusive clear plastic labels capable of storing large amounts of encoded information, thereby increasing the speed and efficiency of cross-country inventory tracking.
But some of the NTRC's most intriguing research takes place "off campus," such as an effort to map traffic flow by tracking individual cell phones, a project overseen by the center's Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory.
By working with a Georgia-based firm that has access to cell phone data, researchers can measure traffic speed and other vital statistics on arterials such as Kingston and Middlebrook pikes, comparing the data collected from moving cell phones with that collected by student assistants actually traveling on the same routes.
"But this is not Big Brother," another NTRC engineer hastens to add. "The data we collect doesn't identify individual drivers. It just gives us an idea of what some cars are doing, where they're going and how fast they're getting there."
January 22, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 4
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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