Real world emissions performance of heavy-duty Euro VI diesel vehicles

Abstract

Despite that Heavy-Duty Vehicles (HDVs) represent a small part of the overall vehicle population they have been identified as one of the most important contributors to air pollution. This is one of the reasons why HDV emissions regulations are becoming more and more stringent worldwide. Following this trend, Europe introduced the Euro VI standard which includes more stringent emission limits for hydrocarbons, PM and NOx, while for the first time a limit for solid PN emissions was set. At the same time increased concern regarding greenhouse gas emissions led to a series of initiatives including HDVs CO2 certification and monitoring with the latest being the submission of a proposal for CO2 emission targets for 2025 and 2030. Despite the general concern, published data regarding Euro VI HDV emissions are scarce, while real-world emission factor measurements of regulated and unregulated pollutants are even more difficult to find. The main objective of this paper is to present real-world diesel Euro VI HDVs emissions of both gaseous pollutants and solid PN. For that reason five HDVs, including four trucks and one bus, were tested on-road under typical driving conditions. A breakdown of the emissions to low, medium, and high speed conditions was also performed with the aim investigating the performance of aftertreatment systems under different speed conditions. All tested vehicles performed better compared to older technology diesel HDVs, thus reflecting the technological improvements introduced over the last years. However, relatively high emissions were observed for some of the pollutants over low speed phases due to reduced effectiveness of the corresponding emission control systems. Calculated emission factors were also compared to existing emission inventories and good correlation was found for NOx, CO2 and solid PN emissions.