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The Pennsylvania State University is one of 16 North American universities that participated in the EcoCAR advanced vehicle technology competition (http://www.ecocarchallenge.org/). A series-hybrid-electric vehicle based on a General Motors crossover SUV platform has been designed, built and tested for this purpose. The powertrain features a 1.3 L turbodiesel engine running on a B20 fuel system, a 75kW generator directly coupled to the engine and advanced lithium-ion batteries. In this paper, the vehicle architecture and control strategy are detailed and performance predictions (e.g., acceleration, fuel consumption and emissions) are presented. This includes discussion of the development process that led to the selected designs. The predicted performance is compared with data obtained on a chassis dynamometer and during on-road measurements over specified drive cycles.

Optical soot pyrometry is a mature experimental technique that has been applied to a broad range of combustion systems for measuring soot temperature and concentration. Even though the method is widely used and well documented, the line of sight nature of the technique makes the interpretation of its results challenging. Notably, gradients in temperature and soot concentration along the line of sight or across the field of view can introduce significant levels of uncertainty in the results. This paper presents a numerical study where the signal from the experimental two-color pyrometry technique in a marine diesel engine reference experiment is reconstructed employing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and a detailed Line-by-Line (LBL) spectral radiation model. The analysis is aimed at qualitatively supporting interpretability of experimental observations.