Fast Measurement of Soot by In-Situ LII on a Production Engine

The contribution of transient emissions to total emissions is becoming more important in view of the improvement of steady state emissions and after-treatment systems. For a critical pollutant, namely soot, there is no commercially available measurement system able to measure sufficiently fast on production engines. This paper presents a measurement setup based on in-situ Laser Induced Incandescence (LII) allowing high speed, frequent soot measurements in a production engine. The setup consists of a pulsed laser system, a fast optical detector and a special, compact designed in-situ optical LII probe which makes it possible to change the measurement location easily. System speed is assessed among other approaches, by using eleven well defined soot steps obtained by injection pulses under controlled conditions on a highly dynamic test bench. The effect of these pulses for a production four-cylinder 2 lt. Euro 5 Diesel engine is measured at three different positions (at tailpipe, downstream of the turbine and in exhaust manifold). The features of LII intensity are extracted by principle component analyses (PCA) and compared with a fast and commercially available device (AVL Opacimeter) at last. The results show that the measurements with the proposed setup are able to detect all peaks in contrast to the commercially available device.