Methanol Vehicles of Volkswagen—A Contribution to Better Air Quality

Improving the use of liquid biofuels in internal combustion engines

“…Early work, presumably with older engine and emissions control technology than is commonly used today, suggested that generally some changes to catalyst formulation may be necessary to ensure long-term catalyst durability with methanol (Nichols et al ., 1988 ), but this is not expected to be an issue with present-day technology: fl ex-fuel vehicles have been shown to be capable of meeting limits for formaldehyde when operated on E85 (West et al ., 2007 ) and are expected to be able to do so for other alcohols such as n-butanol (Gingrich et al ., 2009 ). It is known that aldehyde emissions can be successfully neutralized by the type of three-way catalysts typically used to control emissions of modern spark-ignition engines (Menrad et al ., 1988;Wagner and Wyszy ń ski, 1996 ;Shenghua et al ., 2007 ). Gasoline may actually yield greater challenges with respect to aldehydes on legislated drive cycles in the future: Benson et al .…”

Methanol as a fuel for internal combustion engines

“…Prior to Kowalewicz, McCall and co-workers [238] presented test results using simulated mixtures of gases for both dissociated and steam reformed cases; they showed relative improvements of the order of 30% at light load, showing that there is clearly an effect beyond the increase in LHV. In the 1980s Volkswagen AG also heavily investigated methanol as a transport fuel as part of a German government initiative [239], and within this König et al [240] reported results for dissociated gases using a reformer in the exhaust gas stream in which a copper catalyst was used. They report efficiency improvements for partially dissociated methanol of 10% over pure methanol, with improved exhaust emissions including an 80% reduction in aldehyde emissions to below those from gasoline, and included road load data.…”