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With ever more stringent CO2 emissions mandates, many automobile manufacturers are seeking the fuel economy benefits of diesel and lean-burn gasoline engines. At the same time the emissions standards that diesel and gasoline engines will have to meet in the next decade continue to reduce. Proposed solutions for meeting the stringent emissions standards all appear to have limitations, such as propensities to poisoning from sulfur, narrow operating temperature windows, and requirements for controls that give rapid rich excursions. Non-thermal plasma-catalyst systems have shown good performance in bench testing while being largely unaffected by these same issues. A two-stage system with a unique non-thermal plasma reactor combined with a zeolite-based catalyst has been constructed and shown to work over a wide temperature range.

Technology has progressed from strip charts to computerized acquisition systems. Unfortunately, even with the advanced computational equipment available we still convert the data into “strip chart” graphs (time dependent representation). Perhaps a better way to analyze a complex system such as an automobile would be to graphically represent various parameters and their relationship to each other. Most engine calibrations are presented in this fashion. This paper presents a system to acquire, compactly store, analyze and report data in a relational manner for modeling, trouble shooting, and calibration.