Search

Commercial vehicles require fast aftertreatment heat-up to move the SCR catalyst into the most efficient temperature range to meet upcoming NOX regulations while minimizing CO2. The focus of this paper is to identify the technology levers when used independently and also together for the purpose of NOX and CO2 reduction toward achieving 2027 emissions levels while remaining CO2 neutral or better. A series of independent levers including cylinder deactivation, LO-SCR, electric aftertreatment heating and fuel burner technologies were explored. All fell short for meeting the 2027 CARB transient emission targets when used independently. However, the combinations of two of these levers were shown to approach the goal of transient emissions with one configuration meeting the requirement. Finally, the combination of three independent levers were shown to achieve 40% margin for meeting 2027 transient NOx emissions while remaining CO2 neutral. These independent levers and combinations were also quantified for meeting the new Low Load Cycle. This paper shows which combinations of technologies meets both the transient emission cycles and low load cycles for NOx with adequate margin while also saving CO2.

Commercial vehicles require advanced engine and aftertreatment (AT) systems to meet upcoming nitrogen oxides (NOx) and carbon dioxide (CO2) regulations. This article focuses on the development and calibration of a model-based controller (MBC) for an advanced diesel AT system. The MBC was first applied to a standard AT system including a diesel particulate filter (DPF) and selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalyst. Next, a light-off SCR (LO-SCR) was added upstream of the standard AT system. The MBC was optimized for both catalysts for a production engine where the diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) was unheated for both SCRs. This research shows that the tailpipe (TP) NOx could be reduced by using MBC on both catalysts. The net result was increased NOx conversion efficiency by one percentage point on both the LO-SCR and the primary SCR. The CO2 emissions were slightly reduced, but this effect was not significant. Finally, the MBC was used with a final setup representative of future AT systems which included standard insulation on the catalysts and optimal DEF dosing controls. This final configuration resulted in an improved NOx and CO2 such that the composite Federal Test Procedure (FTP) NOx was 0.060 g/hp-hr and the composite FTP CO2 was 508.5 g/hp-hr. The article details this cycle along with the low-load cycle (LLC) and beverage cycle. More technologies are required to meet the future California Air Resources Board (CARB) 2027 standard, which will be shown in future work.

The commercial vehicle industry continues to move in the direction of improving brake thermal efficiency while meeting more stringent diesel engine emission requirements. This study focused on demonstrating future emissions by using an exhaust burner upstream of a conventional aftertreatment system. This work highlights system results over the low load cycle (LLC) and many other pertinent cycles (Beverage Cycle, and Stay Hot Cycle, New York Bus Cycle). These efforts complement previous works showing system performance over the Heavy-Duty FTP and World Harmonized Transient Cycle (WHTC). The exhaust burner is used to raise and maintain the Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalyst at its optimal temperature over these cycles for efficient NOX reduction. This work showed that tailpipe NOX is significantly improved over these cycles with the exhaust burner. In certain cases, the improvements resulted in tailpipe NOX values well below the adopted 2027 LLC NOX standard of 0.05 g/hp-hr, providing significant margin. In fact, near zero NOX was measured on some of these cycles, which goes beyond future regulation requirements. However, burner operation on the tested cycles also resulted in a CO2 increase, indicating that a different burner calibration strategy, or possibly an additional technology, will be needed to achieve lower CO2 emissions.