Impact of emerging engine and after-treatment technologies for improved fuel efficiency and emission reducion for the future rail diesel engines

The future stringent emission limits and fuel-saving requirements for non-road engines, in particular for the rail sector, require further research investments both on engine and after-treatment technologies. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify, mainly on a literature data base, the most promising emerging engine technologies (waste heat recovery, turbocharging, etc.) and exhaust after-treatment systems (de-NOx catalyst systems, particulate filters, etc.) for improved fuel efficiency and emissions reduction of rail diesel engines. The considered technologies are currently from production series or under development mostly in the on-road research domain. The approach taken has been to gather available information and data from research and industry sources for the most promising emerging technologies of on-road heavy-duty (HD) engines. The collected data have been properly analyzed and elaborated in order to identify the most transferable data from road to the rail sector. The study is one of the results of a project carried out within the 7th European Framework program in which several academic and industrial partners have participated. Engine side and exhaust after-treatment system side technologies are discussed separately. The former takes into account quantitative data from the literature survey, mainly in terms of fuel efficiency benefits, and summarizes the evaluation in a return on investment calculation on the base of a reference rail engine cost. In the latter, essentially qualitative information has been collected. The analysis has been carried out by means of spider diagrams that are used to show the potential of the grouped after-treatment technologies in terms of pollutant emission reduction, size/weight reduction, technology maturity, and cost reduction. The results indicate that the emerging engine technologies are mostly about engine efficiency improvements, of which waste heat recovery shows the greatest potential in terms of fuel efficiency improvement. On the after-treatment system side, the integration of multiple after-treatment functionalities into a single device is particularly attractive for rail applications because it could significantly decrease space and weight requirements, as could the use of alternative to urea media for ammonia storage in the case of selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system functionalities.