Influence of a Fuel Additive on the Performance and Emissions of a Medium-Duty Diesel Engine

This report describes tests of a fuel additive in a medium-duty, high-swirl, direct-injection diesel engine. The additive was found to have little influence on general combustion performance or on NO_x emissions. On the other hand, it had a profound effect on particulate emissions. This was most clear under high load where particle emissions are highest. Here, when the engine was switched from running on the base fuel to the additive treated fuel, particle emissions at first increased and then fell to levels about 40% lower (by particle volume) than those initially produced by the base fuel. The additive had a long lasting effect. After running with the additive for about 25 hours, emission levels with the base fuel were only slightly higher than those with the additive treated fuel. We believe that the additive action is associated with a combination of cleaning and surface conditioning. More work should be done to understand the relative importance of these two mechanisms.