Modeling of Dynamic NOx Emission for Nonroad Machinery: A Study on Wheel Loader Using Engine Test Data and On-board Measurement

Quantification of nonroad machinery emissions is of high importance for improving heavy construction process especially concerning environmental sustainability. In comparison to the substantial research effort on modeling dynamic emissions for road transport, there is however lack of knowledge on how to quantify dynamic emissions during construction operations. This paper proposes an approach to model dynamic NOx emission for nonroad construction machinery using recent experimental data collected by a wheel loader operated in the Chinese environment. In the experiment, emissions were measured during different operational cycles for wheel loader and the data is used for both model calibration and validation. Starting from an initial emission map built from in-lab engine bench test, the model prediction of dynamic NOx emission is calibrated by three real-time engine performance parameters highly correlated to the NOx generation. Considering the characteristics of the nonroad equipment, a dynamic module is added to represent engine state transition due to frequent switching of operational mode in construction activities, making the whole model more accurate in predicting instantaneous emission levels. Compared to the validation data randomly selected from three different cycle tests, the model shows good performance concerning prediction accuracy and with the capacity of handling drastic changes of the working condition of the machine. While the study focuses on the engine-out NOx emission the resulting methodology can be generalized for emission modeling of other nonroad construction machines.