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Power brokers
Page 26
Page 27
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Andy Salter has been to Iveco's engine development centre to meet the men who are developing the power plants that will meet Euro-4, Euro-5 and beyond...
Iveco invested a fortune in engine development during the back half of the last decade resulting, arguably, in the most modern engine line-up in the business. The fruits of this massive investment were borne out at the recent Hanover truck show, where Iveco chief executive Jose-Maria Alapont revealed the company's plans for Euro-4 and Euro-5.
At launches of the Cursor 8,10 and then 13. Iveco stressed this range was fully prepared to power the company's trucks into the next century. The emissions control strategy is set and recent roadtests indicate the Cursor engine family installed in the Stralis is finally coming of age at the fuel pumps.Things are, it would seem, looking up for the Italians.
Much of this success can be laid at the door of its engineers. Tucked away in a quiet quarter of Switzerland on the shores of Lake Konstantz, Iveco's engine development centre is in a most unlikely setting. In fact the site is the former Sauter truck factory,acquired when Fiat bought the Saurer engine division in the early 1980s as it assembled the Iveco empire.
While the area may be more conducive to relaxing than to industry, it obviously works for Iveco. Rudolf Ellensohn is general manager of this temple to engineering: during our recent visit we caught up with him and Iveco's head of engine product development, Giantnaria Olivetti, to talk about the current engine range and their plans for the future. The major focus at present is inevitably on the commercial introduction of Euro-4 and Euro-5 so we start there.
"Our decision to focus on Selective Catalytic Reduction as the Euro-4 strategy for medium and heavy engines [Tector and Cursor] is based on our belief that it is the optimum compromise between the environment and efficiency," says Olivetti. "Up to now the development of the diesel engine has focused on the continual improvement of fuel efficiency and clearly we cannot adopt a strategy that could set that into reverse."
Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) Iveco was a pioneer of SCR when, in 1991. it teamed up with Siemens. Mercedes and MAN to explore the viability of this system. It clearly liked what it saw: "SCR's great advantage is that as well as improving fuel efficiency it also frees us to increase the power density of our engines," says Ellensohn. -This will be realised in better on-road performance in the future."
We've explained before how SCR works (CM 29 July) so we won't waste time going over it again here. However, there remain a number of unanswered questions regarding compliance at Euro-4 and beyond which all manufacturers have to deal with.
-There is a programme for Euro-4 which tightens up on compliance," Olivetti explains. "On the one hand the manufacturers are required to guarantee, from a durability point of view, in-use compliance for 500,000km [Iveco will, in fact, guarantee compliance to a million kilometres] while on the other hand there is a requirement for on-board diagnostics (OBD) to monitor for malfunctions.
"OBD is a big technical issue for the whole industry and there is insufficient time before Euro-4 is mandatory to have all the technical points in place.
"We expect a two-step approach. Firstly the diagnostics will monitor whether or not there is a malfunction.The second step will be to measure the level of that malfunction and then trigger a strategy to minimise the effects.'This could involve protecting the truck, the engine, the driver — and, of course, the environment. If the malfunction was very high this could mean de-rating the engine."
For the first stage Iveco will use a system where it maps the expected temperature throughout the SCR catalyst. If this does not meet the expected levels it will indicate that something is wrong with the system. Iveco has developed a system using NOx sensors after the catalyst.
The post-Euro-5 world remains largely unknown, though as you'd expect Iveco's engine boffins have been assessing likely targets for some time. "It's still not easy to give a fixed idea of what Euro-6 might mean," says Ellensohn,"but as a minimum we're expecting NOx to be halved again and particulates will be so low we're likely to require a particulate trap.
"We're currently evaluating systems which will allow us to meet this, but, until we know what the real limits are, ifs impossible to fully assess exactly what we need."
For the future
Ivecos engineers are confident that they have the platform in place to meet all foreseeable engine emissions requirements. but the development process doesn't stop there. Like the other major players Iveco continues to invest resource in long-term projects.
For example,IICCI (homogeneous charged compression injection) is seen by many engineers as the next major step forward. Ellensohn is more cautious: "The great advantage of HCCI, if correctly controlled, is that you have an engine which has the potential to give very low NOx and almost no particulates.
"The disadvantages at present are that firstly, it's very difficult to control: fuel economy is disadvantaged and it emits rather high hydrocarbons. In addition it is currently only suitable for low engine speed and load operating conditions. Much work still needs to be carried out to overcome these drawbacks. It's expected we'll need a different type of diesel fuel, perhaps synthetic diesel, somewhere between petrol and diesel as we know it.This technology is 10 to 15 years away."
As lveco is happy to remind us,it is the world's largest engine builder. You don't achieve that position without constantly pushing back the boundaries and developing new solutions to the challenges thrown at the road transport industry by legislators and customers.
HCCI may not be the emissions cure-all some had hoped for, but it's an indication of current industry thought and on this evidence lveco is well to the fore. •