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Diversifying energy resources and reducing greenhouse gas emissions are key priorities in the forthcoming years for the automotive industry. Currently, among the different solutions, sustainable biofuels are considered as one of the most attractive answer to these issues. This paper deals with the vehicle application of an innovative diesel fuel formulation using Ethanol to tackle these future challenges. The main goal is to better understand the impact of using biofuel blends on engine behavior, reliability and pollutants emissions. This alternative oxygenated fuel reduces dramatically particulate matter (PM) emissions; this paves the way to improve the NOx/PM/CO₂ trade-off. Another major interest is to avoid adding a particulate filter in the exhaust line and to avoid modifying powertrain and vehicle hardware and therefore to minimize the overall cost to fulfill upcoming emission regulations.

Facing more and more stringent regulations, new solutions are developed to decrease pollutant emissions. One of them have shown promising and relevant results. It consists of the use of ethanol as a blending component for diesel fuel Nevertheless, the addition of ethanol to Diesel fuel affects some key properties such as the flash point. Consequently, Diesel blends containing ethanol become highly flammable at a temperature around ambient temperature. This study proposes to improve the formulation of ethanol based diesel fuel in order to avoid flash point drawbacks. First, a focus on physical and chemical properties is done for ethanol based diesel fuels with and without flash point improvement. Second, blends are tested on a passenger car diesel engine, under a wide operating range conditions from low load low speed up to maximum power. The main advantage of the ethanol based fuels generate low smoke level, that allows using higher EGR rate, thus leading to an important NOx decrease.