Gasoline sulphur content effect on engine catalytic system deterioration

Since 2001, the effect of gasoline sulphur content on engines' pollutant emissions has been studied by PETROBRAS. One of these projects concerned the implementation of a mileage accumulation bench test to evaluate aged engine catalytic systems using gasoline with different sulphur contents in their composition. After the bench test implementation, other tests were performed on vehicle pairs equipped with catalytic converters from different manufacturers, where each pair accumulated mileage with two types of gasoline with 400 ppm and 600 ppm sulphur content. This work reports the results obtained from these tests that provided the deterioration index for each pollutant (CO, HC, Nox, and aldehydes) established by the PROCONVE program, showing how sulphur content reduction affects the vehicle.