Development of a Numerical Investigation for the Assessment of the NOx and CO2 Emissions on a diesel F1A Daily comparing MY19 vs MY21

In the automotive field, the main manufacturers have long been committed to building vehicles with a lower environmental impact to safeguard air pollution and human life. Nowadays the most efficient way to control the emissions on light-duty vehicles is through two different test procedures that have been exploited during this project: roller bench test procedure and RDE (real driving emission) test procedure. The main goal of this study is to develop a numerical investigation to assess the improvement in terms of NOx and CO2 emissions reduction, on a diesel F1A Daily which has been installed on light-duty vehicles, making than a comparison between the model year nineteen (MY19) and the model year twenty-one (MY21). In order to achieve this purpose, first of all, the present legislation has been thoroughly analyzed to understand how to conduct a test, taking into consideration also the adopted instrumentation, and which parameters and calculations needed to be developed to obtain complete analysis and the validation of the test. Secondly, the description of the innovations introduced in 2021 compared to the 2019 technologies have been introduced, focusing the attention on the engine, on the ATS, and on the engine control unit (ECU) software ITEM, which were the main responsible for the emission reduction. Finally, in the last part of this work, a detailed analysis has been carried out on a sample of one hundred vehicles for both the MY19 and MY21 analysing the NOx and CO2 emissions measured during the roller bench test, and thanks to fixed and controlled boundary conditions as temperature, humidity and pressure it has been possible to reiterate the tests several times obtaining always the same exciting results. This procedure has been then repeated considering RDE tests that were carried out to examine NOx and CO2 actual reduction, directly on road, ensuring in this way the reliability of the results.