Vehicle Hydrocarbons\u2019 Emission Characteristics Determined Using the Monte Carlo Method

Abstract

Hydrocarbons (HCs) are products of incomplete combustion process which can occur during operation of the internal combustion engines (Flagan and Seinfeld 1988; Wallington et al. Meteorologische Zeitschrift, 17(2), 109–116, 2008). Incomplete combustion process affects the fuel consumption and engine performance (Baskar and Senthilkumar Engineering Science and Technology, an International Journal, 19, 438–443, 2016; Rakopoulos and Giakoumis 2009) also the emission of unburned HCs affects the emissions of the other air pollutants (Jung et al. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 54, 21–32, 2017; Wang et al. Journal of Environmental Sciences, 46, 28–37, 2016; Kerbachi et al. Energy Procedia, 136, 388–393, 2017). This paper presents the methodology for the investigation of HC amount emitted from internal combustion engines. It can be used for estimation of the emission factors, emissions from various vehicles and engine types, also carrying out the environmental impact assessment of various vehicles. The HC emission characteristics is defined as the dependency between the measured HC emissions (specific distance emission) and the vehicle’s velocity. The Monte Carlo simulation allows determining the HC emission’s characteristics from internal combustion engines. In the paper, five emission characteristics determined using the consecutive Monte Carlo simulations are given. In each case, the characteristic is fit using the 7th degree (order) polynomial regression. The goodness of fit is assessed using Ramsey’s RESET test, and the RMSE. The authors find application of the proposed methodology in various types of the internal combustion engines to assess their environmental properties.