Improvement of PM Combustion Method for Low-mass PM Measurement in Engine Emission

Recently, after-treatment techniques for diesel engine emission reduction have made a remarkable progress. Owing to new techniques such as the diesel particulate filter (DPF), the total amount of particulate matter (PM) collected on filter is rapidly reducing. It is significantly important for an engine operation to control the amount of PM or PM component ratio for high efficient after-treatment operation. Though a conventional gravimetric method is required by regulations, an alternative method, a combustion method, is focused on because of its simple and quick measurement. However it turned out that the combustion method has some difficulties to measure the low mass PM below 0.5mg. Then improvement methods were considered in this paper. Finally the modified instrument showed good correlation with gravimetric results below 0.5mg.