IoT Based Real-World Emission Analysis of Motorcycles

Abstract

The presented study shows results of real driving emission (RDE) measurements of up-to-date Euro 4 four-stroke petrol engines of motorcycles. For the real-world research, a scooter rated at 17,5 kW at 8250 rpm, a small sport motorcycle rated at 32 kW at 9000 rpm and a touring motorcycle at 100 kW rated at 7750 rpm were selected to verify the range of exhaust emissions on the road. All motorcycles have a mixture preparation system by injection system and intake manifold injection. The vehicles were operated at city driving with typical stop-and-go phases areas as well as on highways at speeds up to 130 km/h.

The ultra-compact exhaust measurement system OBM 5.0 was modified for the motorbike application. This mobile exhaust lab offers now close-to-real-time analysis of exhaust components using IoT, cloud computing and V2X connectivity. The exhaust gas mass flow is calculated in real time from the parameters provided by the vehicle field bus and the gaseous components with a mass balance and a reaction kinetics model. The link with the vehicle speed provides the emission rates in grams per distance. Fuel consumption is calculated using the carbon balance. An integrated GPS sensor provides signals to link the geographic information of the measurement sections with the exhaust components and to calculate the resulting real driving resistances. The determined mass emissions of the pollutants, the average particle size and their number are output as a comprehensive data set every second. As a close to real-time check, the data can be assessed locally by the operator on a mobile device.

The installation of the whole system can be done in less than one hour and the equipment worked very satisfying. The investigations carried out showed that the methodology of RDE measurements also leads to good and reliable results in the two-wheeler sector. The three vehicles were dynamically driven in real traffic. It could, as it is already known from other vehicle classes, a wide spread of results within the same actual Euro 4 emission class be observed. With regard to the used three-way catalytic converters, noticeably high carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide emissions were detected in one vehicle.