Case Study Monitoring Diesel Emissions

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             Case Study: Monitoring Diesel Emissions

         INDUSTRY                      APPLICATION                      APPLIED TECHNOLOGIES
                                     Remote Monitoring               CAN, Data Acquisition, Wireless Data
     Commercial Vehicles
                                    Emissions Monitoring                   Transfer, Web Hosting

The Challenge

When the California Air Resource Board (CARB) started implementing tighter regulations on diesel emissions they
needed a means to understand what vehicles and what equipment could be regulated. The most important facet
to designing better emissions filtration is understanding the conditions and operational performance of the vehicle.
Thus, CARB needed a means of monitoring the engine and exhaust performance of ski grooming equipment (ie.
Snow cats) to see if these vehicles could be monitored and regulated.

The Solution

For this 3-month study, several snow cats were equipped with data loggers from DataFleet and deployed at two
California ski resorts. The operational performance of snow grooming equipment, especially at mountain resorts,
is quite severe. Climbing or repelling steep inclines, along with pushing deep and heavy snow, create duty cycles
where the engine load and exhaust conditions are maximized.

DataFleet’s remote monitoring system was designed specifically for this type of field performance testing. The data
logger provided analog inputs for the exhaust temperature and pressure sensors, a port for connecting to the CAN
(J1939) bus, and a GPS antenna. The logger was mounted in an unobtrusive location and by the battery on the
snow cat.

Each night after the resort closed the fleet of snow cats would take to the mountain and perform the various
grooming tasks. These all-night sessions were continuously monitored by the on-board data logger.

Although the data could have been wirelessly transmitted from the ski resorts to the DataFleet datacenter, CARB
chose not to implement this feature, and instead simply downloaded the data from the loggers once the study was
complete. With capacity for over 1,000 hours of data storage, the on-board memory was more than sufficient to
keep all the data.

Benefits of Our Solution

The combination of sensors in the exhaust stack (temperature & pressure), with engine performance monitored
on the CAN (J1939) bus, proved effective for providing CARB with the data needed to study the cycles of exhaust
performance on snow grooming equipment.




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