Particulate matter emission from a heavy duty diesel engine with three binary blends

Low temperature combustion using gasoline-like fuels has the potential to pro-vide high efficiencies and extremely low NO_x and soot emissions. In this study, different volume percentages (30%~70%) of iso-octane, toluene, and n-butanol are blended with n-heptane separately. These blends with different composition ratios are tested on a modified single-cylinder research engine. Also, simulations are performed using a homogeneous reactor method to know the fuel-chemical effects on particulate matter emissions. Thirdly, a composition ratio of 70% is se-lected to perform further experiments based on the results from the initial compo-sition ratio experiments with a focus on the particle size distributions. It was found that if the test fuel can provide sufficient ignition delay to allow fuel to premix with air fully, the soot emissions will be low and particle size is small even if the test fuel contains a lot of aromatic compounds.