Development of a Burner-Based Test System to Produce Controllable Particulate Emissions for Evaluation of Gasoline Particulate Filters 2020-01-0389

Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines have been widely adopted by manufacturers in the light-duty market due to their fuel economy benefits. However, several studies have shown that GDI engines generate higher levels of particulate matter (PM) emissions relative to port fuel injected (PFI) engines and diesel engines equipped with optimally functioning diesel particulate filters (DPF). With stringent particle number (PN) regulations being implemented in both, the European Union and China, gasoline particulate filters (GPF) are expected to be widely utilized to control particulate emissions. Currently, evaluating GPF technologies on a vehicle can be challenging due to a limited number of commercially available vehicles that are calibrated for a GPF in the United States as well as the costs associated with vehicle procurement and evaluations utilizing a chassis dynamometer facility. To address these challenges, a gasoline fueled burner-based technology was equipped with unique hardware to replicate engine-out emission profiles observed with GDI engine applications.

Burner-out soot mass, solid particle number and size distribution, and composition (in terms of elemental and organic carbon) were investigated over various operating conditions. Burner operation was tuned to achieve soot mass concentration ranging from 0.03 mg/m³ to 16.5 mg/m³, and solid particle number concentration from 1.06e+06 particles/cm³ to 2.25e+08 particles/cm³. The geometric number mean diameters (GNMD) of the corresponding particle size distributions ranged from 20 nm to 50 nm. These results highlight that the burner-based platform can be used to generate particle emissions representative of GDI engines. Such a platform can serve as an invaluable tool for GPF design, screening and development due to its flexibility, high degree of repeatability and reduced complexity.