Air quality in urban areas is strongly influenced by exhaust emitted by the public transport fleet. The aim of this study was to analyze benefits in the fuel consumption, fuel costs and exhaust emissions when replacing baseline diesel fueled EURO III city buses by the compressed natural gas (CNG)-fueled EURO V buses and by hydraulic series hybrid diesel-fueled EURO V buses. Real-world measurements were performed on the regular bus route to access realistic energy consumption and exhaust emissions. Instantaneous gaseous emission (CO₂, CO, NO_x and THC) were measured together with the instantaneous PM₁₀ mass emission. Innovativeness of the presented approach thus arises from the systematic comparison of different powertrain technologies under real-world drive cycles and measuring time traces of not only gaseous but also of PM₁₀ mass emissions. Furthermore, lumped cycle averaged emissions are interpreted and explained by typical powertrain performance parameters and exhaust emission time traces. Cumulative results indicate that application of the CNG fueled buses does not necessary reduce CO₂ emissions compared to diesel-fueled buses whereas reduction in fuel costs is evident. Additionally, it is shown that hybrid operation of the hydraulic series hybrid diesel-fueled bus resulted in higher fuel consumption due to poorly optimized hybrid topology and control strategy. Furthermore, analyses of the time traces point out inadequate lambda control of CNG-fueled buses and nucleation mode-based particle number emissions during deceleration.

An innovative computationally efficient method for the simultaneous determination of top dead centre (TDC) offset and pressure offset is presented. It is based on characteristic deviations of the rate of heat release (ROHR) that are specific for both offsets in compression phase and expansion phase after the end of combustion. These characteristic deviations of the ROHR are derived from first principles and they were also confirmed through manual shifts of the pressure trace. The ROHR is calculated based on the first law of thermodynamics using an in-cylinder pressure trace, engine geometrical parameters and operating point specific parameters. The method can be applied in off-line analyses using an averaged pressure trace or in on-line analyses using a single pressure trace. In both application areas the method simultaneously determines the TDC position and the pressure offset within a single processing of the pressure trace, whereas a second refinement step can be performed for obtaining more accurate results as correction factors are determined more accurately using nearly converged input data. Innovative analytic basis of the method allows for significant reduction of the computational times compared to the existing methods for the simultaneous determination of TDC offset and pressure offset in fired conditions. The method was validated on a heavy-duty and a light-duty diesel engine.

This paper presents a control-oriented thermodynamic model capable of predicting nitrogen oxides (NO_x) emissions in diesel engines. It is derived from zero-dimensional combustion model using in-cylinder pressure as the input. The methodology is based on a two-zone thermodynamic model which divides the combustion chamber into a burned and unburned gas zone. The original contribution of proposed method arises from: (1) application of a detailed two-zone modeling framework, developed in a way that the thermodynamic equations could be solved in a closed form without iterative procedure, which provides the basis for achieving high level of predictiveness, on the level of real-time capable models and (2) introduction of relative air-fuel ratio during combustion as a main and physically motivated calibration parameter of the NO_x model. The model was calibrated and validated using data sets recorded in two different direct injection diesel engines, i.e. a light and a heavy-duty engine. The model is suitable for real-time applications since it takes less than a cycle to complete the entire closed cycle thermodynamic calculation including NO_x prediction, which opens the possibility of integration in the engine control unit for closed-loop or feed-forward control.