Technical Paper
VERT: Diesel Nano-Particulate Emissions: Properties and Reduction Strategies
1998-02-23
980539
Increasing concern, about the health risk due to solid aerosols from engine combustion, has provoked more stringent imission limits, for soot particles in the range of pulmonary intrusion, at critical work-places (e.g. tunnel sites, see Table 1). Within the scope of the joint European project VERT, these emissions were characterized and their effective curtailment through exhaust gas after-treatment investigated. Diesel engines, irrespective of design and operating point, emit solid particulates in the range of 100 nm, at concentrations above 10 million particulates per cm3. Engine tests showed that a drastic curtailment of pulmonary intruding particulates seems not feasible by further development of the engine combustion, nor by reformulation of fuels, nor by deployment of oxidation catalytic converters. Particulate traps, however, can curtail the total solid particulate count, in the fine particulate range 15-500 nm, by more than two orders of magnitude.