Emissions from heavy-duty diesel, natural gas, and diesel-hybrid electric vehicles – Part 1. NOx, N2O and NH3 emissions

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The current study characterized nitrogen oxide (NOx), nitrous oxide (N2O), and ammonia (NH3) emissions from 14 heavy-duty vehicles from different vocations (school bus, transit bus, refuse hauler, delivery vehicle, and goods movement vehicle) over different drive cycles using a chassis dynamometer. Test vehicles with engines ranging in model year from 2009 to 2018 and including diesel and compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles. The diesel vehicles included both vehicles without selective catalytic reduction (no-SCR) and with SCR certified to the 0.2 g per brake horsepower-hour (g/bhp-hr) [0.27 g/kilowatt-hour (kW-hr)] NOx emissions standard that were operated with diesel fuel, with a subset tested on hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO). The CNG vehicles were all three-way catalyst (TWC) equipped and certified to either the 0.2 or 0.02 g/bhp-hr NOx standard [0.27 or 0.027 g/kW-hr]. This study is part of a larger project that included over 200 in-use heavy-duty vehicles, which is one of the most extensive studies of emissions from modern heavy-duty vehicles to date. NOx, NH3, and N2O emissions varied depending on the vocation and the technology. Average NOx emissions for the Urban Dynamometer Driving Schedule (UDDS) cycle over all vehicles ranged from 0.003 to 6.16 g/bhp-hr [0.004 to 8.25 g/kW-hr] and from 0.02 to 17.2 g/mile [0.012 to 10.7 g/km], with the diesel vehicles showing the highest emissions, the 0.2 g/bhp-hr certified CNG vehicles showing lower emissions, and the 0.02 g/bhp-hr certified CNG vehicles showing very low emissions. NOx emissions over other different cycles were generally in the same range as those for the hot start UDDS, with the highway cycles generally showing the lowest emissions. CNG vehicles had relatively high NH3 emissions ranging from 0.13 to 0.34 g/bhp-hr [0.17 to 0.46 g/kW-hr] and from 0.44 to 0.97 g/mile [0.27 to 0.6 g/km] over the hot start UDDS compared to the SCR-equipped diesel vehicles due to NH3 formation across the TWC. N2O emissions did not show consistent trends and were near/at the detection limits for a number of the vehicles.