Performance and Exhaust Emissions of Hyundai Flexible Fuel Vehicle (FFV)

Recently, flexible fuel vehicle (FFV) has been drawn great attention because of its response for immediate use as alternative fueled one. Hyundai FFV can be operated on arbitrary fuel mixtures between gasoline and M85 with the specially programmed electronic control unit (ECU) which can determine optimized fueling quantity and ignition timing as the methanol content by the signal from electrostatic type fuel sensor. In this paper, the results of various tests including engine performance, cold startability, durability and exhaust emission reduction have been described. Full load, cold mode durability tests and field trials have been carried out with some material changes and surface treatments in the lubricating parts and fuel system. But, more work on its durability improvement is still required. In view of exhaust emission reduction, aftertreatment system consisted of 4 k aged manifold type catalytic converter (MCC) and secondary air injection system has shown good emission reduction performance including formaldehyde emission at any methanol blends.