Using snapshot measurements to identify high-emitting vehicles
Research output: Contribution to journal › Research article › Contributed › peer-review
Contributors
Abstract
Policy makers have long been interested in detecting 'high-emitters', a supposedly smallfraction of vehicles that make disproportionally large contributions to total fleet emissions. However, existing identification schemes often exclusively rely on snapshot measurements (i.e. emissions within less than a second), and thus simply identify vehicles with high instantaneous emissions, instead of vehicles with high average emissions over a driving period as regulated by emission standards. We design a comprehensive scheme to address this challenge by combining fleetwide remote sensing measurements with detailed second-by-second emission measurements from individual vehicles. We first determine the trip-average NO x emission rates of individual vehicles in a Euro-5 diesel fleet measured across European locations; this allows, second, to calculate the fraction and emission contributions of high-emitters based on trip-average emission. We demonstrate that the identification of high-emitters is quite uncertain as long as it is based on single snapshots only; but 80% of the high-emitters can be identified with over 75% precision with five or more repeated measurements of the same vehicle. Compared to the conventional detection schemes, our scheme can increase the identified high-emitters and associated emission reductions by over 140%. Our method is validated and shown to be superior to the conventional interpretation of snapshot measurements.
Details
Original language | English |
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Article number | 044045 |
Journal | Environmental research letters |
Volume | 2022 |
Issue number | 17(4) |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Peer-reviewed | Yes |
Externally published | Yes |
External IDs
ORCID | /0000-0002-5465-8559/work/150883943 |
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Keywords
Sustainable Development Goals
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Keywords
- air pollution, diesel cars, high-emitter, remote sensing, vehicle emission