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Concern in Europe about the environmental impact of the car has lead to ever more stringent emission legislation, and in the near future, conformance to this emission legislation to extended mileage, typically 50,000 miles, will be required. Vehicle manufacturers prove out this conformance by emission testing vehicles at this extended mileage. Mileage accumulation takes several months, so there is a clear need to develop a process which replicates this vehicle aging in a much reduced time frame and cost. This paper describes an engine dynamometer based catalyst aging process and the correlation to European ‘worst case’ 50,000 miles vehicle aged catalysts. Correlations have been achieved for close-coupled catalysts taken from a 1.3 8V and 1.25 16V B-Car sized vehicle. The significance of this correlation allows representative vehicle aged catalysts to be delivered in hours as opposed to months.

The development and optimisation of an ultra-fast response chemiluminescence NOx analyser, equipped with a high temperature stainless steel, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) to nitric oxide (NO) converter, for the transient measurement of the NOx (NO + NO2) content of automotive emissions is described. Conventional analysers routinely used to measure NOx in automotive exhaust utilise chemiluminescence detection (CLD). Ultra-fast time-scale analysis using CLD, however, has traditionally been hindered by the slow conversion of NO2 to NO. The converter and technology used in the instrument described herein enables a 10-90% response time of less than 10 ms. Following optimisation in the laboratory, the fast response CLD NOx analyser was evaluated for raw exhaust sampling of port fuel injected (PFI) gasoline and diesel vehicles.