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The introduction of particulate and oxides of nitrogen (NOx) after-treatment controls on heavy-duty vehicles has spurred the need for fleet emissions data to monitor their reliability and effectiveness. The University of Denver has developed a new method for rapidly measuring heavy-duty vehicles for gaseous and particulate fuel specific emissions. The method was recently used to collect 3088 measurements at a Port of Los Angeles location and a weigh station on I-5 in northern California. The weigh station NOx emissions for 2014 models are 73% lower than 2010 models (3.8 vs 13.9 gNOx/kg of fuel) and look to continue to decrease with newer models. The Port site has a heavy-duty fleet that has been entirely equipped with diesel particulate filters since 2010. Total particulate mass and black carbon measurements showed that only 3% of the Port vehicles measured exceed expected emission limits with mean gPM/kg of fuel emissions of 0.031 ± 0.007 and mean gBC/kg of fuel emissions of 0.020 ± 0.003. Mean particulate emissions were higher for the older weigh station fleet but 2011 and newer trucks gPM/kg of fuel emissions were nevertheless more than a factor of 30 lower than the means for pre-DPF (2007 and older) model years.

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A method for varying the supersaturation in a turbulent mixing CNC has been used to examine heterogeneous nucleation of different compounds (working fluid) on various nuclei's compositions. Supersaturation was controlled by changing the vapor pressure of working fluid in nozzle flow, which was accomplished by saturating only a predetermined fraction of the flow while the keeping the total flow and temperature constant. This approach allows the partial pressure of the working fluid to be varied while maintaining a constant flow structure and temperature field. Experimental results characterizing the initial stages of heterogeneous nucleation are presented for NaCl, KCl, AgCl, and Ag particles. Heterogeneous nucleation was examined at various pressures of dibutylphthalate, octadecane, octadecanol, and octadecanoic acid. For octadecanoic acid as the working fluid, the size distribution of the grown particles is unimodal with the size increasing with increasing pressure of the working fluid. For the other working fluids, the initial size distribution splits into a bimodal distribution with one mode approximately the same as the initial distribution and a larger sized mode that grows with increasing pressure of the condensing vapor. For NaCl and octadecane and octadecanol, the initial unimodal size distribution splits into a trimodal size distribution.

Using a modified turbulent mixing CNC, the heterogeneous nucleation of different compounds (working fluids) on nanometer sized carbon particles was examined. The working fluids were dibutyl phthalate, octadecane, octadecanol, and octadecanoic acid. Based on the particle size distributions measured with a scanning mobility particle sizer system, nucleation and consequent growth were examined with respect to different temperature and vapor pressure for each working fluid. Nucleation rates for all conditions were calculated from the fitted size distribution data by subtracting the residual nonactivated particle concentration for each condition. Experimental nucleation rates were compared to the calculated ones based on Fletcher's heterogeneous nucleation theory. This theory matches well with the experiments with octadecanol and octadecanoic acid, and at high supersaturation ratios for dibutyl phthalate. However, the theory shows discrepancies with the observed phenomena at low supersaturation for dibutyl phthalate, and especially for octadecane. Several possible hypotheses for the discrepancies and observed particle growth are discussed.

Laser ablation allows significant number of particles to be generated from the surfaces of cement, chromiumembedded cement, stainless steel, or alumina. The number concentrations and size distributions of the particles were experimentally investigated with respect to applied laser fluence (mJ cm −2 ) and wavelength. Based on the measurements, 266-nm laser ablation generates particles most efficiently. Of the three materials tested, cement was the most favorable for material removal, stainless steel was the next, and alumina was the least. The removal of particles from chromium-embedded cement by 532-and 1064-nm-wavelength lasers was less effective than from stainless steel, but more effective than from alumina. For ablation with a 266-nm laser, chromium enhanced the removal above 20 J cm −2 . Comparisons of other characteristics such as the size and removal rate of these particles are also discussed in this paper. ᭧

The formation of carbon nanohorns by laser ablation was investigated using a scanning differential mobility analyzer combined with an ultrafine condensation particle counter. The measurement technique provided time-resolved size distributions for the carbon nanoparticles every minute during the course of the production run. The instrument performance was reasonably stable most of the time; however, during laser ablation, shockwave oscillations leading to significant transient flow and pressure variations were shown to disrupt the DMAs ability to measure accurate distributions. On the basis of the general trend observed in the data taken during the laser-ablation experiments, we found that the geometric mean diameter of the produced population shifted to larger particle sizes with increases in pulse width. For a given laser peak power and repetition rate, carbon nanoparticles of mobility diameter close to 100 nm were produced in a large abundance using longer laser pulse lengths (e.g., 10 ms) as compared to the shorter pulse lengths (e.g., 1 ms). A quantitative assessment of the particle size dispersion (using statistics like the geometric standard deviation) in relation to the laser pulse width could not be done with certainty as the shockwave disturbances produced by the laser-ablation process caused significant disruption to SMPS measurements. When laser ablation was not in operation, it was found that carbon nanoparticles with mobility diameters centred at about 20 nm could be produced by thermally desorbing the previously deposited carbon nanoparticles from the reactor wall at temperatures greater than 1300 K.