RUN a car engine for half an hour, and 80 per cent of its hydrocarbon
emissions will be spewed out in the first two minutes, while it鈥檚 still cold.
But American researchers have found a way to make an engine behave as if it鈥檚
warmed up all along, reducing pollution from the moment you turn the ignition
key.
Their secret? To keep a proportion of the car鈥檚 most volatile fuel to one
side and use it for the engine鈥檚 starting phase.
Car engines can only burn petrol once it has been vaporised. But much of the
fuel drawn into a cold engine remains as a liquid and is emitted from the
exhaust without being burnt. This unburnt fuel reacts with nitrogen oxides to
create ozone, one of the major components of smog.
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To counter this, the researchers have developed a distillation device that
uses heat from the car鈥檚 engine to separate out the 5 per cent of the fuel made
of the smallest, most easily vaporised hydrocarbon molecules. This is stored in
a separate reservoir to be used when the engine is started.
Since most of this fuel is vaporised even in a cold engine, it slashes the
amount of unburnt hydrocarbons emitted by more than 50 per cent in the start-up
phase. The new distillation gadget weighs just 2.5 kilograms.
The device was designed and patented by engineers at the University of Texas
in Austin and the Ford Motor Company. 鈥淭he engine will behave as if it鈥檚 fully
warmed up, even when it isn鈥檛,鈥� says Rudy Stanglmaier, one of the inventors at
UT鈥檚 Southwest Research Institute. Ford will test it this year in a Lincoln
Navigator.