Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CARES (City Air Remote Emission Sensing)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2022-05-01 al 2023-04-30
CARES is an international cooperation (InCo) flagship project funded by the Horizon 2020 Work Program on “Smart, green and integrated transport”.
The overall objective of CARES is to reduce the hurdles for practical applications of remote emission sensing (RES) and to make it a widespread means of both monitoring and enforcing improvements in road vehicle emissions. RES is defined as applications of technologies capable of performing contactless and non-intrusive measurements of the emissions from individual vehicles under real-world operation conditions, either from the roadside or by means of instrumented vehicles measuring the pollutant concentrations in the exhaust plume of the vehicle in front.
Measuring real-world emissions from individual vehicles operating in everyday traffic is crucial to understand how both vehicle emission enforcement and emission regulation policies should best be designed to reduce pollutant emissions and improve air quality in the most cost-effective way.
To fulfil the overall objective of CARES, the project takes on in-depth research and innovation amplified by demonstration activities in the following interlinked fields:
- Further development of plume chasing and point sampling RES techniques to overcome today’s technical and economical shortcomings of RES.
- Development of standardised software to organise and link different types of RES data and databases for easier use and access by technical personnel and enforcement agencies.
- Demonstrations of the further developed RES techniques as well as the software innovations in heavily polluted and to illustrate how RES can be used in practice by local and national authorities to help reduce emissions and improve air quality.
- Integration of RES into policy making and enforcement practices by provision of practical guidance on how to best fit for purpose the different types and combinations of RES, software tools to make data analysis easier, and methods to determine reliable profiles for high-emitter detection.
The overall objective of CARES is to reduce the hurdles for practical applications of remote emission sensing (RES) and to make it a widespread means of both monitoring and enforcing improvements in road vehicle emissions. RES is defined as applications of technologies capable of performing contactless and non-intrusive measurements of the emissions from individual vehicles under real-world operation conditions, either from the roadside or by means of instrumented vehicles measuring the pollutant concentrations in the exhaust plume of the vehicle in front.
Measuring real-world emissions from individual vehicles operating in everyday traffic is crucial to understand how both vehicle emission enforcement and emission regulation policies should best be designed to reduce pollutant emissions and improve air quality in the most cost-effective way.
To fulfil the overall objective of CARES, the project takes on in-depth research and innovation amplified by demonstration activities in the following interlinked fields:
- Further development of plume chasing and point sampling RES techniques to overcome today’s technical and economical shortcomings of RES.
- Development of standardised software to organise and link different types of RES data and databases for easier use and access by technical personnel and enforcement agencies.
- Demonstrations of the further developed RES techniques as well as the software innovations in heavily polluted and to illustrate how RES can be used in practice by local and national authorities to help reduce emissions and improve air quality.
- Integration of RES into policy making and enforcement practices by provision of practical guidance on how to best fit for purpose the different types and combinations of RES, software tools to make data analysis easier, and methods to determine reliable profiles for high-emitter detection.
Overview of CARES results and their exploitation and dissemination:
- Two different RES techniques – point sampling (PS) and plume chasing (PC) RES – have successfully been further developed. The CARES PS RES technology enables – by the means of low-cost sensors – to accurately measure remotely, for the first time, exhaust particulate matter emissions from individual passing vehicles from the
roadside, as Black Carbon (BC) and particle number (PN). The CARES PC RES technology have incorporated these sensors, and the measurements have been automated to a large extent, enabling unskilled personnel to routinely carry out the measurements at a lower cost. Both technologies have been demonstrated to compare well with
on-board emission measurements (PEMS/SEMS) as well as conventional remote sensing instruments.
- Accessibility and standardization of remote emission sensing data has been achieved in the project by integrating datasets into a state-of-the-art database. Analysis is achieved by packaging a set of database queries and graphing algorithms alongside a standard data format in a series of web-applications that can either be ‘open’ where
data is public, or where data sharing agreements are in-place can be accessed by pre-approved and registered users. The apps allow users to interact and visualize aggregate data. Thanks to the CARES project the new database hosts more than 2 million emission records from cities across Europe, which is more than a doubling
of the number of records compared to when the project was launched in May 2019.
- In the demonstration measurement campaigns in the heavily polluted cities Milan, Krakow and Prague, the emissions from more than 300,000 vehicles were measured. The measurements demonstrated that remote emission sensing technologies can be successfully deployed in urban settings and that the various techniques can
complement each other. Plume chasing, point sampling and mobile sampling were used to successfully measure pollutants to CO2 ratios such as for NOx, CO, HC, BC, PN/PM and speciated VOCs. An important observation is that the average NOx emissions from Euro 6d-temp and Euro 6d diesel cars have been reduced substantially
compared to the Euro 5 and early Euro 6. However, still large differences can be seen between different engine families as regards the real-world NOx emission performance within both the Euro 6d-temp and the Euro 6d category, indicating that some engine families may not comply with the RDE legislation standards and raising the
need of a better NOx RDE surveillance, linked to relevant actions where and whenever needed.
- In the project, methods and procedures to detect high-emitting vehicles, both light- and heavy-duty, in real-world traffic have been substantially improved. For instance, there are findings that clearly show that tampering and other reasons for NOx high-emitting trucks to appear on European roads are common even among those that
are legislated to the Euro 6 standard, and even worse for the Euro 5 standard. Further, it has been shown that among light-duty diesel vehicles equipped with diesel particulate filters (DPF), especially the older ones, a significant share has very high emissions of particulate matter expressed as particle number, indicating that their DPFs
are not working properly.
- Through the development of the openCARES software, both data analysis and report writing for remote emission sensing measurement campaigns can be made much easier and at a lower cost.
- CARES has resulted in a number of papers published in scientific journals and presentations at international and national scientific and stakeholder conferences, workshops and seminars - see the CARES website (https://cares-project.eu/) for a multitude of examples and in particular the CARES Final Dissemination Report.
- During the whole duration of the project, CARES consortium partners have been involved in several remote sensing campaigns outside the project that may have not come to life without CARES, a nice result in terms of CARES exploitation. Examples are the first ever remote sensing measurements conducted in Germany in Berlin and
Frankfurt, in Brussels and in Sarajevo, and several plume chasing measurements carried out on trucks on highways in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Belgium (Flanders).
- Two different RES techniques – point sampling (PS) and plume chasing (PC) RES – have successfully been further developed. The CARES PS RES technology enables – by the means of low-cost sensors – to accurately measure remotely, for the first time, exhaust particulate matter emissions from individual passing vehicles from the
roadside, as Black Carbon (BC) and particle number (PN). The CARES PC RES technology have incorporated these sensors, and the measurements have been automated to a large extent, enabling unskilled personnel to routinely carry out the measurements at a lower cost. Both technologies have been demonstrated to compare well with
on-board emission measurements (PEMS/SEMS) as well as conventional remote sensing instruments.
- Accessibility and standardization of remote emission sensing data has been achieved in the project by integrating datasets into a state-of-the-art database. Analysis is achieved by packaging a set of database queries and graphing algorithms alongside a standard data format in a series of web-applications that can either be ‘open’ where
data is public, or where data sharing agreements are in-place can be accessed by pre-approved and registered users. The apps allow users to interact and visualize aggregate data. Thanks to the CARES project the new database hosts more than 2 million emission records from cities across Europe, which is more than a doubling
of the number of records compared to when the project was launched in May 2019.
- In the demonstration measurement campaigns in the heavily polluted cities Milan, Krakow and Prague, the emissions from more than 300,000 vehicles were measured. The measurements demonstrated that remote emission sensing technologies can be successfully deployed in urban settings and that the various techniques can
complement each other. Plume chasing, point sampling and mobile sampling were used to successfully measure pollutants to CO2 ratios such as for NOx, CO, HC, BC, PN/PM and speciated VOCs. An important observation is that the average NOx emissions from Euro 6d-temp and Euro 6d diesel cars have been reduced substantially
compared to the Euro 5 and early Euro 6. However, still large differences can be seen between different engine families as regards the real-world NOx emission performance within both the Euro 6d-temp and the Euro 6d category, indicating that some engine families may not comply with the RDE legislation standards and raising the
need of a better NOx RDE surveillance, linked to relevant actions where and whenever needed.
- In the project, methods and procedures to detect high-emitting vehicles, both light- and heavy-duty, in real-world traffic have been substantially improved. For instance, there are findings that clearly show that tampering and other reasons for NOx high-emitting trucks to appear on European roads are common even among those that
are legislated to the Euro 6 standard, and even worse for the Euro 5 standard. Further, it has been shown that among light-duty diesel vehicles equipped with diesel particulate filters (DPF), especially the older ones, a significant share has very high emissions of particulate matter expressed as particle number, indicating that their DPFs
are not working properly.
- Through the development of the openCARES software, both data analysis and report writing for remote emission sensing measurement campaigns can be made much easier and at a lower cost.
- CARES has resulted in a number of papers published in scientific journals and presentations at international and national scientific and stakeholder conferences, workshops and seminars - see the CARES website (https://cares-project.eu/) for a multitude of examples and in particular the CARES Final Dissemination Report.
- During the whole duration of the project, CARES consortium partners have been involved in several remote sensing campaigns outside the project that may have not come to life without CARES, a nice result in terms of CARES exploitation. Examples are the first ever remote sensing measurements conducted in Germany in Berlin and
Frankfurt, in Brussels and in Sarajevo, and several plume chasing measurements carried out on trucks on highways in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Belgium (Flanders).
Progress beyond state of the art:
- For the first time, user functions for structured RES data analyses have been developed for non-experts for them to fully exploit RES data.
- For the first time, remote emission sensing measurements have been carried out of PN and BC emissions.
- For the first time, air quality monitoring data in a city street canyon has been linked to measured real driving emissions from individual vehicles passing through the same street canyon.
- A new dedicated database platform serving the handling, storage and analysis of remote emission sensing data has been developed and demonstrated.
- A novel approach to use data from measurements by means of commercial remote sensing instruments to detect high-emitting light-duty vehicles has been developed and demonstrated.
- Identification of passing PN/PM high-emitting light-duty diesel vehicles from the roadside with the CARES point sampling RES technology.
- For the first time, user functions for structured RES data analyses have been developed for non-experts for them to fully exploit RES data.
- For the first time, remote emission sensing measurements have been carried out of PN and BC emissions.
- For the first time, air quality monitoring data in a city street canyon has been linked to measured real driving emissions from individual vehicles passing through the same street canyon.
- A new dedicated database platform serving the handling, storage and analysis of remote emission sensing data has been developed and demonstrated.
- A novel approach to use data from measurements by means of commercial remote sensing instruments to detect high-emitting light-duty vehicles has been developed and demonstrated.
- Identification of passing PN/PM high-emitting light-duty diesel vehicles from the roadside with the CARES point sampling RES technology.