Innovative Process for Reducing Emissions of Particulates 2 – PIREP2

PIREP2 deals with the characterization and elimination of soot particulates emitted by Hybrid Diesel Cars (HDC). The main objective of PIREP2 is to develop a new generation of self-regenerating Diesel Particulate Filters (self-DPF) from the knowledge on filtering electrochemical catalysts acquired during the PIREP1 project (ADEME program, 2007-2010), managed by IRCELYON with the support of PSA.

The main advantage of Hybrid Diesel cars is to strongly reduce the fuel consumption and, consequently, the emission of CO2 as well as the vehicular dependence on hydrocarbons. This achievement is absolutely necessary for limiting the global warming of earth and its disastrous impacts. The ambitious target fuel consumption of HDC is 3 L for 100 km for a medium motorisation passenger vehicle (1.6 L). This represents a 50% reduction of the fuel consumption. However, HDC will still require a complex catalytic post-treatment in order to achieve future European legislations (EURO 6 in 2014 and EURO 7 in 2018-2020) in terms of emissions of NOx, unburned hydrocarbons, CO and particulate matter. The actual solution for removing soot particulates is the Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) which is a porous ceramic structure. In addition, the necessary periodic regeneration of these DPFs is performed by post-injection of fuel which allows, via the exothermicity of oxidation reactions, a rapid increase of the DPF temperature catalyzing soot oxidation. These regeneration steps induce fuel overconsumption that undermines the main objective of the Hydrid Diesel Technology.

PIREP2 is an industrial research program which aims to :

o Develop and optimize self-DPFs, based on ionic conducting ceramics, able to continuously burn soot particulates from 250°C without fuel overconsumption and without the use of noble metals.
o Understand the mechanism for soot particulates activation by ionic conducting ceramics.
o Analyse the gaseous and particulate emissions of HDC as well as the impact of self-DPF on nucleation processes (production of ultrafine particulates).