Objective
Objectives and content
In inner city areas, where the ambient air quality is
most directly influenced by tailpipe emissions and where
people on the street breath what has been emitted a few
meters besides them by vehicles, the substitution of
heavy duty diesel vehicles by natural gas vehicles is
most favourable because of their quite negligible
particulate level. Not only particulates, but also other
pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and non-methane
hydrocarbons, which are strong promoters of ozone
formation, can be dramatically reduced by feeding the
heavy duty engines with natural gas, that is the only one
true alternative to crude oil.
Unfortunately present heavy duty (HD) natural gas (NG)
engines are not able to maintain these so interesting
features under the new European transient test cycle
(ETC), to which they will be subjected in 2000, and,
above all, to guarantee the respect of the originally low
emission levels along the engine useful life because of
lacking of an advanced industry-oriented NG component
technology; the advanced technology represents the key
issue to exploit the emission / fuel economy potential of
different combustion strategies (lean-burn and
stoichiometric).
The project deals with the design and development of two
combustion strategies, lean-burn and stoichiometric,
based on advanced NG components, gas feeding and
integrated gas injection and ignition system, to be
combined with an advanced NG aftertreatment system,
resulting from another project belonging to the same
cluster on HD NG engines, in order to meet, on the new
European transient cycle, very low emission figures, even
lower than figures proposed by the Commission under the
present steady-state 13-mode test cycle, and to achieve a
fuel consumption reduction by 15% with respect to present
natural gas engines.
A comparative assessment on heavy duty engine
demonstrators of three natural gas engine configurations
characterised by the two combustion strategies and two
engine displacements, 7.8 and 9.5 litres, will supply
information on the potential of HD NG technology in terms
of the overall emissions / fuel consumption / performance
trade-off, playing at the same time a strong prenormative
role in the definition of the non mandatory emission
standards will be enforced in Europe on enhanced
environmentally friendly vehicles and engines.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
Data not availableFunding Scheme
CSC - Cost-sharing contractsCoordinator
10043 Orbassano Torino
Italy