The Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Center for Transportation Analysis (CTA) has, for the past five years, conducted a significant amount of heavy truck research under its Heavy truck Safety Program. This research has included:

* Heavy Truck/Infrastructure Crash Modeling
* Heavy Truck Dynamics Modeling with Emphasis on Braking
* The Role of Heavy Trucks in Emergency Evacuation
* Photonics for Heavy Truck Safety
* Truck Rollover Characterization
* Characterization of Friction Performance of Aftermarket Brake Linings

Because of this strong emphasis in heavy truck safety, the National Transportation Research Center, Inc. (NTRCI) selected CTA to conduct a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study of brake performance of OE and AM brake linings. An important and unique distinction of this research was that brake performance would be evaluated within three distinctive research domains; laboratory, test-track, and field test. In addition, ORNL was to look at the performance in these domains to see if a correlation exists between them. Please note that with regard to these three domains, face validity increases from laboratory to field-test, but so does the complexity in controlling the study variables.