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Bio-butanol has been widely investigated as a promising alternative fuel. However, the main issues preventing the industrial-scale production of butanol is its relatively low production efficiency and high cost of production. Acetone-butanol-ethanol (ABE), the intermediate product in the ABE fermentation process for producing bio-butanol, has attracted a lot of interest as an alternative fuel because it not only preserves the advantages of oxygenated fuels, but also lowers the cost of fuel recovery for individual component during fermentation. If ABE could be directly used for clean combustion, the separation costs would be eliminated which save an enormous amount of time and money in the production chain of bio-butanol.

Due to the increasing consumption of fossil fuels, alternative fuels in internal combustion engines have attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Ethanol is the most common alternative fuel used in spark ignition (SI) engines due to its advantages of biodegradability, positively impacting emissions reduction as well as octane number improvement. Meanwhile, acetone is well-known as one of the industrial waste solvents for synthetic fibers and most plastic materials. In comparison to ethanol, acetone has a number of more desirable properties for being a viable alternative fuel such as its higher energy density, heating value and volatility.

Individual organic compounds such as hopanes and steranes (originating in lube oil) and selected polycyclic aromatic compounds (PAHs) (generated via combustion) found in particulate emissions from vehicles have proven useful in source apportionment of ambient particulate matter. Currently, little ambient data exists for a majority of these species. Trace organic species in the size-segregated ultrafine (<0.18 µm) and accumulation (0.18-2.5 µm) particulate matter (PM) modes were measured during the winter season next to a busy Southern California freeway with significant (∼20%) diesel traffic. The ultrafine mode was further segregated into 4 size ranges (18-32 nm, 32-56 nm, 56-100 nm, and 100-180nm) with a NanoMOUDI low-pressure cascade impactor sampler. Both ambient and concentrated size-segregated impactor samples were taken in order to collect enough mass for chemical analysis.

Many efforts have been made to apply the diesel exhaust particulate after-treatment system in practical use during the past ten years. In this paper, a diesel exhaust particulate after-treatment system with microwave energy as its external regeneration energy source is described, and the microwave regeneration characteristics of the diesel exhaust particulate after-treatment system developed are studied. The experimental results show that the regeneration efficiency can reach up to 80% with a wide regeneration window and a suitable regeneration duration. The effect of air supply on filter regeneration is also observed. It is proven that the microwave regeneration technique employed in the system is simple, effective and reliable.