Cummins: From industrial powerhouse to high-tech leader

COLUMBUS — Cummins Inc. used to frame the few patents it received each year and hang them in a hallway at its tech center here. Growing inventiveness has put a stop to that.

Last year, Cummins received more than 60 patents and filed for 200 others — too many to display. The explosion in patentable work is one sign of a notable evolution at one of Indiana's old-line industrial companies: Cummins has become one of Indiana's high-tech leaders.

Since its founding in 1919, Cummins has built a reputation and plenty of profits on soot-emitting diesel engines that took muscle, monkey wrenches and mechanical know-how to make.

That has changed over the past two decades with the coming of ever-stricter pollution regulations and growing demands for fuel efficiency. To cope, Cummins turned to technology in a sweeping way.

Cummins' Indiana workforce of 8,000 today includes more than 175 scientists with doctorates. The company is the largest Indiana user of H-1B visas, used to hire foreign workers with technical skills and advanced degrees (more than 2,000 applied for since 2010).

It's also an avid user of Indiana University's Big Red supercomputer and regularly contracts with research powerhouses Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories, where it has more than a dozen projects in the works.

"The regulators and customers have driven us to be much more sophisticated," said Aleksey Yezerets, a Russian-educated scientist who is director of catalyst technology at Cummins. "It requires an engineering village. It requires much more technical expertise than it did."

Nowhere is Cummins' growing geek side better seen than at its tech center.

The two-building complex, designed in modernist style and linked by a glassy walkway, was built in the 1960s on the edge of Columbus' downtown. It's home to 370 research and technology employees, almost four times more than worked here in 2005.

Heading up the R&T team is Wayne Eckerle, 62, an Indiana native who holds a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics and calls himself a "combustion guy." He and John Wall, Cummins' chief technical officer and a native of Alabama, have led the company's high-tech charge.

Eckerle calls advanced technology "the ticket to the dance" for Cummins. The company, a pioneer in diesel engines, has faced increasingly higher hurdles just to keep its products on the market. Air pollution regulators have targeted diesels since the 1970s because they burn dirtier than gas engines and are widely used — in heavy-duty pickups, long-haul trucks and construction equipment.

But advanced technology has allowed Cummins to meet one tougher emission standard after another aimed at its diesels, Eckerle says.

He stands in a small conference room, where the honk of geese from a pond outside intrudes now and then into his scientific talk, and points to a slide on a screen. The graphic shows a 99 percent decline in soot and other particulate pollution from Cummins' truck engines since 1988.

"A lot of technology went into doing this," Eckerle said.

Cummins' evolution into a high-tech company has given it entire departments that barely existed 20 years ago. Two are systems performance and catalyst research. Cummins also has dived deeply into combustion research to better understand the soul of its diesels.

In addition, Cummins built research centers abroad to take advantage of foreign talent. It has 1,000 engineers in China and 200 in India.

With such a large base of scientists on staff, "We've been able to do some things ... we've never been able to do before," Eckerle said.

That includes understanding more about the complexities of combustion, which in a diesel engine entails 2,000 simultaneous chemical reactions.

Divakar Rajamohan, an Indian-born and educated engineer who is a technical adviser in combustion research, cues up a Cummins slide that shows the process of combustion in living color. It looks much like a blossoming flower. Cummins has developed complex computer models of combustion that even account for the bubbles that form in the fuel when it's injected into the combustion chamber.

To improve its combustion modeling, Cummins licenses a commercial computerized code at a cost of more than $1 million a year. The cost is worth it, Eckerle says. The code helps Cummins do thousands of computer-simulated combustion tests a year, compared with a few hundred 10 years ago, when technology was more limited.

Cummins has poured millions of dollars into catalyst research to clean up engine emissions. That has required the engine maker to develop a strong chemistry side, hiring scientists who understand things such as zeolite, an absorbant mineral that is used in catalysts to remove pollutants in engine exhaust.

"There is a chemical plant behind every engine," Yezerets said. In his lab, Yezerets' chemists "interrogate" soot, studying the surface of minuscule soot particles using nanotechnology.

Systems performance also has gone up-tech. In Cummins' case, the system is usually a truck.

Tara Hemami, who heads systems performance analysis, shows off a computer-simulated truck-driving model Cummins developed to test new engines in virtual settings under 100 different scenarios. And different drivers. The Cummins model calls its good driver, who shifts perfectly, Cyber Charles. The bad driver: Cyber Soccer Mom.

The model even simulates different altitudes and temperatures, from Arctic cold to desert heat, to see how the engine performs, says Hemami, who grew up in Ohio and earned a doctorate at the University of Illinois.

Cummins put all its technical wherewithal to the test in a just-ended four-year project called Super Truck. The $80 million project was funded by the Department of Energy and private industry to try to develop a new semitrailer truck with vastly improved fuel efficiency.

Eckerle said Cummins assigned 20 people full time to the Super Truck project and was happy with the results. The truck developed by the team of companies was powered by a Cummins prototype engine and averaged 10.7 miles per gallon of fuel in tests. That compares with today's average of about 6 mpg for over-the-road trucks.

Cummins, of course, must test its new engine designs not only virtually, but for real. Its tech center includes 88 test cells where engines are fired up in soundproof rooms and their performance is analyzed down to the tiniest detail.

Ecklerle walks through the factorylike space, where blue-collar mechanics mix with tech types. He stops by one test cell where an engineer puts a natural gas engine through the paces, watching performance data shown on seven computer screens at once.

The test center is the biggest in the world for diesel engines, and Eckerle says he has made changes to squeeze the most use out of it as possible.

Employees work four shifts so the 88 test cells are in use around-the-clock seven days a week. Engines awaiting testing are lined up on dollies and pre-wired with monitors and other test equipment, looking like hospital patients prepped for surgery.

Occasionally a competitor's engine finds its way into the test center to be closely analyzed by Cummins' engine designers. Eckerle points to a Mercedes-Benz engine being disassembled. How much does Cummins learn from studying its competitors' engines?

"A lot, a lot," Eckerle said.

Wall, who tinkered with Studebaker engines as a teenager, credits Cummins' embrace of high-tech for allowing the company to survive the regulatory demands and remain standing as the only independent diesel engine maker left in the United States.

Cummins has added 1,000 engineers to its Indiana workforce over the past 10 years, and its research into catalytic systems has allowed it to create a thriving side business that sells $2 billion worth of emissions systems a year. Cummins' total revenue in 2014 was $19 billion (about the same as Eli Lilly and Co's).

New products will require Cummins to plumb high-tech even more. It has natural gas, electric and other types of new engines in the works. And there's the QSK95, a mammoth 4,000-horsepower industrial and locomotive engine that will start rolling off a production line in Seymour this year.

That engine, developed for $100 million, is the largest high-speed diesel on the market. Even larger versions are coming. "It has taken us in new dimensions," Wall said.

Hand that man a sheaf of patent applications.

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317) 444-6483. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSwiatek.