Technical Paper
Experimental and Simulation Approaches to Understanding Soot Aggregation
1999-05-03
1999-01-1516
During 1998, the US Federal authority introduced a requirement for vehicles powered by heavy duty diesel engines that NOx emissions shall be less than 4 g/bhp.h. This represents a 20% reduction over current levels and has prompted significant further hardware changes. As a result of these increasingly tighter NOx emission constraints, soot loading of diesel engine lubricants - due to retarded fuel injection, is becoming an ever more significant issue in crankcase lubricant formulation. For this reason, increased understanding is required of the mechanism of soot particle aggregation and resultant aggregate morphology - together with the likely consequences for the performance of soot-laden lubricants, for viscosity increase, filter blocking, sludging and (directly or indirectly) - soot-induced wear. We describe here a combined experimental and simulation approach to screening formulated lubricants and characterising soot aggregate structures.
