Search Results

Transient emission peaks have become an important fraction of the total emissions during the standardized test cycles for passenger car Diesel engines. To this end this paper is concerned with the challenge of measuring emissions during transients. The importance of this topic is increasing due to strict regulation on pollutant emissions. Hence, suitably accurate and fast measurement devices for PM emission detection are required. Thus, we present a comparison between different measurement techniques for Particulate matter (PM) emissions from a Diesel engine, in particular during transients. The compared equipments include AVL Micro soot sensor, AVL Opacimeter, Differential mobility spectrometer and Laser induced incandescence. The goal of this paper is to reveal the most accurate device in the sense of sensitivity and dynamics for fast measurements of PM from a Diesel engine.

Measurements of transient emissions become more important due to the increasing contribution of transient operation to the total tail pipe emissions. While for many quantities measurement devices with response time in the range of few milliseconds exist, the same is not true for particulate matter(PM). Pulsed Laser Induced Incandescence (LII) is widely used in experimental setups and may offer a viable approach also for production engines, but the specific nature of LII raises doubts on the quantitative precision achievable by the method, especially in transient operation. Indeed, there are two main problems in particular for dynamic measurements. On one side, the emitted laser power must be high enough to excite a sufficiently large number of particles within the observed area, but not as high to destroy them, and varying engine operating conditions imply changes in the number and size distribution of the particles as well.

The Laser Induced Incandescence technique (LII) is a sensitive optical method for reliable spatially and temporally resolved measurement of particulate matter (PM) concentration. This technique appears to be suitable for measurement of fast transient PM emissions, from diesel engines, which forms the main fraction of total emissions during standardized test cycles. However, the existing commercial LII devices require modifications in the exhaust gas flow, dilution, sampling cell, or it measure only in a partial stream. This article presents the development of a laser based optical setup - LII for rapid in-situ measurement of PM concentrations during the combustion process of a diesel production engine. The presented LII setup is suitable for direct in-situ, full stream, measurements of soot emissions without needs of dilution or a sampling cell.