Dedicated HVO Vehicle: Fuel Economy & Emission Reduction Potential of HVO for Euro 6 Compliant Passenger Car Diesel Applications

Authors

Dr.-Ing. Om Parkash Bhardwaj, Dipl.-Ing. Thorsten Michaelis-Hauswaldt,
FEV Europe GmbH, Aachen;
Ahmad Omari, MSc., Marius Zubel, MSc.,
Institute for Combustion Engines, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen;
Jukka Nuottimäki, MSc., Markku Honkanen, MSc.,
NESTE, Espoo

Summary

This work describes a joint research project conducted by NESTE and FEV aiming to demonstrate the efficiency improvement and emission reduction potential of a commercially available EN15940 Class A compatible biofuel; Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (HVO), for EU6 compliant Diesel passenger car applications.
Investigations were carried out by FEV’s dedicated research tool-chain for alternative fuels, which comprises of a single cylinder engine (SCE), a multi-cylinder engine and a demonstrator vehicle. All engines in the toolchain belong to FEV's High Efficient Combustion System (HECS) engine family and have almost identical combustion systems. In a first step, HVO combustion was characterized by fundamental investigations on the HECS single cylinder research engine. Subsequently, a global Design of Experiments (DoE) optimization approach was carried out on the HECS multi-cylinder engine to obtain a calibration optimization strategy for HVO. In third and final step, the optimization strategy derived from previous single and multicylinder engines was implemented to the HECS demonstrator vehicle and validated
using the worldwide harmonized light-duty test procedure (WLTP). Two scenarios are considered; HVO as a drop-in fuel and HVO operation with a dedicated calibration. The HVO tests reveal a strong reduction of CO, HC, PM and PN emissions as well as
a higher thermal efficiency at a diesel-equivalent NOx level. Although, for the HVO drop-in tests the volumetric fuel consumption was slightly higher than diesel (+1.5%) due to the lower volumetric heating value of HVO. With the HVO optimized tests however, this shortcoming could be over-compensated and a 2.3% benefit in
volumetric fuel consumption was achieved with respect to diesel. The CO₂ emissions with HVO operation were reduced by 7.3% in the drop-in case and by 10.8% with the optimized engine calibration.

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