Emissions and noticeable air quality improvements

Billy NY

Well-known Member
Well the below post regarding ULSD fuel and lubricity got me to thinking about a few things.

Has anyone noticed a reduction in smog ?

My house is situated on a hill that is shaped like a spur, I am high enough in elevation that I can see well over 30 miles from the kitchen window. A few miles away, there lies the hudson river and I-787, a major route for commuters, besides I-87, I-90 and others close by. I'm sort of on the eastern rim of the hudson river valley. less than 2 miles from the descent down into it and to the river.

I do not see the darker haze that used to settle in by 9am, which was very distinct in contrast. I remember it well in the mid to late 70's, you did not see it on sunday mornings or major holidays. You can see much more clearly than in the past. I use to see the same effect, much larger and more dense in the NYC area, having worked there 15+ years. Not sure about how it compares to today. I've seen it in LA numerous times having been there many times over the years, just not recently.

Fog settles in the same area, its pretty cool sometimes, as its clear elsewhere in the morning but the fog cloud is sometimes real dense over the river.

I can remember if you left an older vehicle, with a carburetor, running near ones house on a calm day, you could smell it inside at some point.

My elderly mother left a '14 model year SUV running in the garage for hours before I discovered it, (thats another story). I had been rehabilitating an american crow that literally had white wings, he was something else to say the least and his roost was in the adjacent bay, and he was still standing!(I was not happy about this at all!) If that had been say a typical GM with a small block chevy, or anything similar, don't matter what mfr., my old '64 F600 292 Y Block, or how many others similar, I can't see the results being the same. It would have reeked in there. I heard the fan on the vehicle kick in, was like what in h$ll is that ??? Odd noise always put me on alert, so I opened the cellar door and the heat was as if the stove was in use down there. The odor,(carbon monoxide is odorless) was minimal and in a few hours with the doors and cellar windows open with a fan going, it was clear and you could not tell. I don't know if it was similar to a confined space situation with bad air, but it was running for hours as I determined later.

I'm not a fan of the EPA and all the government nonsense, as well as many things that are related to what we have today in modern vehicles and equipment, that is another discussion for some other place. I have noticed a significant change is my point, anyone else see it ? Just me ? LOL !

One thing that stood out to me as a kid was the old D7 my father had, which I still have, is that it ran clean, there was no real heavy soot cloud, no real blue or oil related smoke, the only time you could get big plumes of white smoke is if you turned the fuel on and left the compression off or half or somewhere in between, fuel would load up, (probably wash the cylinders) then combust, clear out. You are not supposed to pull that throttle lever up until its ready to fire. When doing that, you'll get a little of each, some white, some soot, but not much of either. The D8800 was designed to run on a variety of available fuel way back when, 30's-40's, they ran clean, cleaner than anything I recall in diesel,(which does not mean much LOL!) as I am no diesel technician or mechanic by any means. So if they could do that with old technology, fuels, oils, etc. why did we have these engines, (ie; mack trucks for example with 5 speed trans) that could make thick black soot plumes, later model caterpillars, and so many others when shifting or changing throttle to speed up or increase power, would get so much smoke and soot ? I remember driving mack tandem dumps that had those 5 or 6 speed transmissions and with a load on, headed up hill, with the wide gap in the gear ratios, I remember watching that thick smoke plume until she caught up. I remember running a tri-axle freightliner, (handle used to be "freight-shaker", 8spd, lo hole and 315 cummins. It was an '87 I ran in '91, hardly a soot plume ever and it was ok on power. It was no match for a 425 Cat as I saw what the trucks could do on hills with that engine, but it was pretty decent overall.

Crazy how its all evolved over time, hopefully we have cleaner air, it looks that way from my view point here on the hill.
 
We used to have a lot of days when they had air quality alerts. I haven't heard one in years now.

On a related topic, I grew up in a town that a branch of the Rouge river ran thru. When I was a kid, one time it turned orange. Kids used to set fire to patches of oil that were drifting downriver. It was quite common for neighbor's to run their cars over the curb, so they could do a oil change over the storm sewer, draining the oil into the storm drain. When they started to hand out tickets for that, the hillbillies complained about the gubermint.
 
Yep, I didn't think of that. We're just you-know-whatting in the wind til India, Russia, China, and Japan decide to try some of this new-fangled emission reduction.
 
Also wonder how much of the clear air you have now is from all the factories being closed up and everything being made in China ! I hear it is getting messy over there now.
 
Some time in the past I posted a youtube link here of some old 8mm footage of the rail system in the nearby city, late 50's or so. The surrounding areas, buildings, the loco's, wore some of the railroad by products, the old canopies, overhangs at the rail station, were loaded with coal soot from steam locomotives, funny how that particular rail system was in use, longer than its been gone.

Another tidbit from the past, what were those dark streaks on the old concrete highways back in the day, anyone? Oil, exhaust ?


(highway example at 0:34 and 0:42 in the attached link)
Link
 
(quoted from post at 13:48:56 10/31/14) Yep, I didn't think of that. We're just you-know-whatting in the wind til India, Russia, China, and Japan decide to try some of this new-fangled emission reduction.

They do want it. We are working on it. We have a TierII emissions level pump line nozzle engine in a D9R bound for the Russian and possibly China and India market without any electronics and can run on really poor quality fuel. It's not Tier IV level of clean but it gets to where it does without any electronics. The world is slowly demanding cleaner air, cleaner fuels.

One of the biggest challenges to getting a diesel to very low soot levels is fuel quality and cleanliness. You have to raise injection pressure to reduce soot or raise cylinder pressure and temps. The downside to just raising cylinder pressure is a tradeoff in NOx emissions. Decrease particulates, increase NOX. The other knob that can be turned is injection pressure. To raise injection pressure requires tighter clearances in pumps and injectors. Clearances so tight that the dirt and debris in less regulated countries (LRC) cause premature fuel system failures. You can only have so many filters on an engine and they are only so effective at removing debris. No one wants to replace 6-8 filters to last 200-250 hours.

If you get into electronic controls on injectors you can do some rate shaping on fuel delivery and multiple shots to improve combustion efficiency and reduce emissions.

It's not going to happen overnight. The responsibility does not lie solely on engine manufacturers. The infrastructure in fuel refining and handling needs to improve to meet the needs of today's engines. As information and technology spreads through the developing countries and computer skills and ability to transmit information over internet becomes available they can begin using electronic control engines.

If you were to take a Tier IV engine off the end of the production line and take it to China and burn their fuel it wouldn't likely make it to 10% of desired rebuild life. Problems with fuel system and aftertreatment would be constant.
 
No doubt the emission controls work, at least the new ones do! Look at how many cars and trucks are on the road today compared to 40 years ago when we first began to realize there was a growing problem.

The older, carburated, crudely designed emissions, they were an unfunny joke! But now, with the electronics, exacting mixtures, state of the art efficiency, the emissions are nearly zero.

I can be on the road, windows down, and actually smell an older vehicle before I see it! Imagine if they all still smelled that way!

I remember in the late 60's, the "environmentalists" (if that term was even invented then) were predicting we would all need gas masks and oxygen to go outside in a few years... (Not sure where the inside air was supposed to come from!LOL) But if something hadn't been done, think they might have been right!
 

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