Technical Paper
The Particulate Number: A Diesel Engine Test Method to Characterize a Fuel's Tendency to Form Particulates
1994-10-01
942021
A new criterion to assess diesel fuels has been developed at the Institut Français du Pétrole, in collaboration with PEUGEOT and RENAULT. It is a comparative method which makes it possible to assign a Particulate Number (PN) to a diesel fuel, calibrated, as for the cetane number, with two reference fuels specially formulated. One has a low emission level, the other one a very high level. Values PN=0 and PN=100 are respectively attributed to each of them. The first is made up of tetradecane, and the second of a highly aromatic mixture containing 55 % tetradecane, 40 % 1-methyl-naphthalene and 5 % phenanthrene. The PN value of a diesel fuel derives from measurements of particulate emissions of an engine successively fuelled with the three products (CPP) and from a simple analysis in laboratory of the nitrogen content (N) of the tested fuel.
