Transitions to manual control from highly automated driving in non-critical truck platooning scenarios

Automated truck platooning is getting an increasing interest for its potentially beneficial effects on fuel consumption, driver workload, traffic flow efficiency, and safety. Nevertheless, one major challenge lies in the safe and comfortable transitions of control from the automated system back to the human drivers, especially when they have...

The effect of see-through truck on driver monitoring patterns and responses to critical events in truck platooning

Automated platooning of trucks has its beneficial effects on energy saving and traffic flow efficiency. The vehicles in a platoon, however, need to maintain an extremely short headway to achieve these goals, which will result in a heavily blocked front view for the driver in a following truck. Monitoring surrounding traffic environment and...

Assessing driver's ability to estimate compliance rates to in-car, advisory driver support

Purpose: In-car support systems focus increasingly on improving traffic flow and throughput. Advisory systems allow for fast market penetration, advising drivers how to drive in order to improve general flow. By following the advice, drivers cannot create a beneficial effect by themselves but rely on other road users to comply as well. Drivers...

Predicting annoyance by wind turbine noise

While wind turbines have beneficial effects for the environment, they inevitably generate environmental noise. In order to protect residents against unacceptable levels of noise, exposure-response relationships are needed to predict the expected percentage of people annoyed or highly annoyed at a given level of wind turbine noise. Exposure...

Early stage beneficial effects of cathodic protection in concrete structures

Over the last 25 years, cathodic protection (CP) of reinforced concrete structures suffering from chloride induced reinforcement corrosion has shown to be successful and durable. CP current causes steel polarisation, electrochemical reactions and ion transport in the concrete. CP systems are designed based on experience, which results in...

CO2 neutral glass manufacturing?: A study of the possibilities

The technological needs to achieve CO2 neutrality during glass manufacturing have been investigated by theoretical calculations on energy balances and experimental investigations on batch reactivity and fining efficiency. The concept is based on the assumption of utilization of woody bio fuel combustion directly over the batch blanket and glass...