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Waste heat recovery based on an Organic Rankine Cycle is a technology proposed for the reduction of the fuel consumption of heavy-duty vehicles. This technology is currently not simulated by VECTO, the tool used in Europe to certify the fuel consumption and CO2 emissions of new heavy-duty vehicles. In this work, a class 5 lorry equipped with a prototype Organic Rankine Cycle system is tested on the chassis dyno during steady state and transient driving cycles, with the waste heat recovery enabled and disabled. The waste heat recovery system enabled a brake specific fuel consumption reduction of 3.1% over the World Harmonized Vehicle Cycle, 2.5% during the official EU Regional Delivery Cycle, and up to 6.5% at certain engine operating points during the fuel consumption mapping cycle. A model of the vehicle was created in VECTO based on the experimental data. The fuel consumption map of the engine with and without the Organic Rankine Cycle was derived from the steady-state experiments.

The Vehicle Energy Consumption calculation Tool (VECTO) is used for the official calculation and reporting of CO2 emissions of HDVs in Europe. It uses certified input data in the form of energy or torque loss maps of driveline components and engine fuel consumption maps. Such data are proprietary and are not disclosed. Any further analysis of the fleet performance and CO2 emissions evolution using VECTO would require generic inputs or reconstructing realistic component input data. The current study attempts to address this issue by developing a process that would create VECTO input files based as much as possible on publicly available data. The core of the process is a series of models that calculate the vehicle component efficiency maps and produce the necessary VECTO input data. The process was applied to generate vehicle input files for rigid trucks and tractor-trailers of HDV Classes 4, 5, 9 and 10.

Heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) account for some 5% of the EU’s total greenhouse gas emissions. They present a variety of possible configurations that are deployed depending on the intended use. This variety makes the quantification of their CO2 emissions and fuel consumption difficult. For this reason, the European Commission has adopted a simulation-based approach for the certification of CO2 emissions and fuel consumption of HDVs in Europe; the VECTO simulation software has been developed as the official tool for the purpose. The current study investigates the impact of various technologies on the CO2 emissions of European trucks through vehicle simulations performed in VECTO. The chosen vehicles represent average 2015 vehicles and comprised of two rigid trucks (Class 2 and 4) and a tractor-trailer (Class 5), which were simulated under their reference configurations and official driving cycles.