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Over the past decade significant research and development activities have been invested in alternative fuels in order to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel sources and reduce CO₂ and local emissions from traffic. One result of these R&D efforts is paraffinic diesel fuels, which can be used with existing vehicle fleets and infrastructures. Paraffinic diesels also have other benefits compared to conventional diesels, for example, a very high cetane number and the lack of sulfur and aromatic compounds. These characteristics are beneficial in terms of exhaust gas emissions, something which has been demonstrated in numerous studies. The objective of this study was to develop low-emission combustion technologies for paraffinic renewable diesel in a compression ignition engine, and to study the possible benefits of oxygenated paraffinic diesel.

State-of-art light duty diesel vehicles and heavy duty diesel engines are utilized in studying the effect of a novel particle oxidation catalyst (POC®) on particle emission. In addition to the regulated particulate matter (PM) emission measurement, a real time mass emission and particle number size distribution measurements are utilized in testing. The results show that the particle oxidation catalyst can have a significant decreasing effect on the diesel exhaust particle emissions. For example, in light duty applications PM reductions of 55-61% were achieved over the New European Driving Cycle (NEDC) when using a POC of same size as the engine volume. The usage of a DOC in combination with the POC ensures proper regeneration of the POC substrate. The size distribution measurements revealed that the particle number collection efficiency for smaller particles i.e. the nanoparticles was very high, being close to 100 %.