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A team of students at Columbia University has made it to
the next round of Walmart's Better Living Business Plan Challenge.
They achieved their spot in the sustainability-focused competition
by - yes, reinventing the wheel. The team has proposed a business
venture that would make energy efficient, lightweight composite
wheels for buses, trucks and other large vehicles.
Advancing in the competition means a chance to pitch the
plan to top Walmart execs and earn seed money to get started.
Lightweight composite wheels are familiar to bicyclists and
ATV enthusiasts, but their use in wheels for heavier vehicles
has been limited so far. That could be about to change. Three
of the four members of the Columbia
team are Boeing employees involved in the distance learning
program of the Columbia School of Engineering and Applied
Sciences - so, a likely inspiration for the project is the
growing use of durable, lightweight composite materials in
aircraft.
Durability is the key to translating composite wheels into
use by trucks and other heavy vehicles and another factor
is cost. If the fuel savings are high enough, even a relatively
expensive wheel could result in significant savings for fleets
of vehicles - at least the larger ones.
There's a hungry market out there, also, as both government
and corporate fleet owners look to sustainability for cost
cutting. That would include municipal bus fleets, to say nothing
of the entire US Department of Defense - which is aggressively
pursuing sustainability as a national security issue - and
innumerable commercial fleets, including top players like
FedEx, Waste Management and, of course, Walmart.
Carbon fiber is one of a number of composite materials that
have come into widespread use for bicycles. For ATV wheels,
a glass-carbon composite is on the market. One engineering
issue to solve is the tendency of composites to crack under
pressure, or to shred after being cut, so the ability of composite
wheels to withstand brutal ATV racetrack conditions is a good
indicator that high performance and high durability can translate
out of the cycling world and into other areas.
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