Case Study -
Refrigerated Trucking
Refrigerated delivery truck covered with CoolFilm.
There are more than 4 million refrigerated trucks on the road in the United States today. Keeping them cold while reducing the need for traditional refrigeration would reduce costs and be environmentally beneficial. Heat Inverse worked with New Transport Applications (NTA, now a DHL subsidiary) to demonstrate cost savings and energy efficiency improvements for NTA’s fleet of refrigerated trucks. The pilot was sponsored by TechEmerge, a World Bank Subsidiary.
CoolFilm was applied to the surface of a truck and compared to an uncoated, control truck of the same type. A 12% decrease in duty cycle, or HVAC “on” time, in the refrigeration system of the film-covered truck was measured. This decrease in duty cycle corresponds to about a 28% reduction in cooling fuel needs. This equates to an estimated yearly savings of ~210 gallons of diesel fuel per truck. Heat Inverse estimated that NTA would see a yearly savings of nearly $975 in fuel costs per delivery truck. Additionally, CoolFillm was estimated to avoid approximately 1.9 tons of CO2 per truck annually. Results on longer reefers are expected to be even better since the surface area to volume ratio is higher with those units.
Refrigerated trucks used in the testing.
“More customers need this! This is amazing!”
– Feedback from The World Bank (pilot sponsor)