Modeling cold soak evaporative vapor emissions from gasoline-powered automobiles using a newly developed method

ABSTRACT

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) evaporate and vent from a vehicle’s fuel tank to its evaporative control system when the vehicle is both driven and parked. VOCs making it past the control system are emissions. Driving and parking activity, fuel volatility, and temperature strongly affect vapor generation and the effectiveness of control technologies, and the wide variability in these factors and the sensitivity of emissions to these factors make it difficult to estimate evaporative emissions at the macro level. Established modeling methods, such as COPERT and MOVES, estimate evaporative emissions by assuming a constant in-use canister condition and consequently contain critical uncertainty when real conditions deviate from that standard condition. In this study, we have developed a new method to model canister capacity as a representative variable, and estimated emissions for all parking events based on semi-empirical functions derived from real-world activity data and laboratory measurements. As compared to chamber measurements collected during this study, the bias of the MOVES diurnal tank venting simulation ranges from ?100% to 129%, while the bias for our method’s simulation is 1.4% to 8.5%. Our modeling method is compared to the COPERT and MOVES models by estimating evaporative emissions from a Euro-3/4/5 and a Tier 2 vehicle in conditions representative for Chicago, IL, and Guangzhou, China. Estimates using the COPERT and MOVES methods differ from our method by ?56% to 120% and ?100% to 25%, respectively. The study highlights the importance for continued modeling improvement of the anthropogenic evaporative emission inventory and for tightened regulatory standards.

Implications: The COPERT and MOVES methodologies contain large uncertainties for estimating evaporative emissions, while our modeling method is developed based on chamber measurements to estimate evaporative emissions and can properly address those uncertainties. Modeling results suggested an urgent need to complete evaporative emissions inventories and also indicated that tightening evaporative emission standards is urgently needed, especially for warm areas.