Calibrated Success

If I’m honest, my brain still hurts a little. I was humbled to spend the last week listening to and speaking with some of the brightest minds on the planet regarding mobile emissions. The CRC and OSAR conferences bring together experts from academia, agencies, and private industry to discuss a wide range of topics regarding real world emissions and how we measure them. Topics ranged from large marine diesels to lawnmowers and everything in between.

While I am admittedly nowhere near an expert in two-stroke diesels that get measured in megawatts, much of the diesel research was still applicable to my work on light duty spark ignited engines. In depth discussion of NOx sensor technology, the formation of ammonia, particulates, and various oxides of nitrogen definitely crosses over. A representative from the EPA had a very eye opening review of just how many defeat device equipped diesels they found at a recent heavy duty equipment and vehicle auction. (It was almost 30% of vehicles sampled!) They are most certainly aware of what these look like and how they are being employed. On the other end of the spectrum, data was also presented from field measurements of high mileage gasoline powered cars in Nigeria. Again, truly some eye-watering levels of pollutants were found where the vehicles are well beyond their planned compliance life and fed with poor quality fuel.

For my part, I was able to present some of the in-use testing I have been doing using our in house Mini-PEMs and the VMAS units. The emphasis here was to show a cost effective way to knock off the first layers of emissions testing prior to running expensive 1065 laboratory tests when the expected result isn’t going to be within 3% of an already tight standard. The reality is that data that is within even 10% can be extremely useful when the larger real world noise factors are taken into account. Companies looking to perform early product development and agencies testing likely dirty vehicles can both same time and money with these simpler measurements.

To cap the week off, I went straight to the SEMA Garage from the airport to help with the ETTN Student Career Fair held in conjunction with the Detroit section of SAE. Turnout here was impressive with so many dedicated students showing such interest for jobs in the performance industry. These are our future, and we couldn’t be happier.