Search Results

The Finnish pulp and paper company, UPM, will start a biorefinery in Finland in 2014 to produce advanced renewable diesel in commercial scale. The fuel production is based on using crude tall oil (CTO), a wood-based residue of pulping process, as a raw material. The end product, CTO based renewable diesel called UPM BioVerno, is a novel high quality drop-in diesel fuel resembling fossil diesel. It reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80 % when compared to fossil fuels. In this study, the CTO renewable diesel was studied as a blending component in regular mineral-oil based fossil diesel fuel in field testing. The functionality and performance of four (4) passenger cars was evaluated by comparing e.g. fuel consumption and exhaust emissions of CTO renewable diesel blend (R20UPM) with fossil reference fuel. The field test included 20.000 km on-road driving with each car by experienced drivers from VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

The temperature regime of driving conditions in Nordic countries is very wide. This may have some effect on the performance and durability of the emission control systems used in todays vehicles, because normally these are designed with a less rigorous environment in mind. This paper describes durability and cold-start performance results obtained with two current technology TWC-cars in a full 80,000 km's on-the-road test under realistic driving conditions in Finland. The temperature extremes during the 24-month test period ranged from -28° to + 28°C. All vehicles were operated in day-to-day traffic as normal passenger cars without using any predetermined driving pattern. This practice is in contrast to the standardized durability run. The evaluation of long-term emissions performance showed a reasonable low deterioration over the test. However, at an early stage of the test one of the cars suffered from a mechanical failure in the converter unit leading to reduced performance.

Experiments with gasoline and diesel engines has been carried out in a cold chamber at constant ambient temperature ranging from +20°C to −30°C. The test results showed that in gasoline engines the use of the enrichment devices necessary during cold-start and warm-up period has a major impact on the total emissions of the engines. The carburetted test engines were also found to be quite sensitive to intake air temperature. In case of a diesel engine cold start and ambient temperature has less effect on emissions because of the differences in mixture formation and combustion process. However, CO and HC emissions increased along with the smoke emission, when test temperature was lowered.