Overview of CARES results and their exploitation and dissemination:
- Two different RES techniques – point sampling (PS) and plume chasing (PC) RES – have successfully been further developed. The CARES PS RES technology enables – by the means of low-cost sensors – to accurately measure remotely, for the first time, exhaust particulate matter emissions from individual passing vehicles from the
roadside, as Black Carbon (BC) and particle number (PN). The CARES PC RES technology have incorporated these sensors, and the measurements have been automated to a large extent, enabling unskilled personnel to routinely carry out the measurements at a lower cost. Both technologies have been demonstrated to compare well with
on-board emission measurements (PEMS/SEMS) as well as conventional remote sensing instruments.
- Accessibility and standardization of remote emission sensing data has been achieved in the project by integrating datasets into a state-of-the-art database. Analysis is achieved by packaging a set of database queries and graphing algorithms alongside a standard data format in a series of web-applications that can either be ‘open’ where
data is public, or where data sharing agreements are in-place can be accessed by pre-approved and registered users. The apps allow users to interact and visualize aggregate data. Thanks to the CARES project the new database hosts more than 2 million emission records from cities across Europe, which is more than a doubling
of the number of records compared to when the project was launched in May 2019.
- In the demonstration measurement campaigns in the heavily polluted cities Milan, Krakow and Prague, the emissions from more than 300,000 vehicles were measured. The measurements demonstrated that remote emission sensing technologies can be successfully deployed in urban settings and that the various techniques can
complement each other. Plume chasing, point sampling and mobile sampling were used to successfully measure pollutants to CO2 ratios such as for NOx, CO, HC, BC, PN/PM and speciated VOCs. An important observation is that the average NOx emissions from Euro 6d-temp and Euro 6d diesel cars have been reduced substantially
compared to the Euro 5 and early Euro 6. However, still large differences can be seen between different engine families as regards the real-world NOx emission performance within both the Euro 6d-temp and the Euro 6d category, indicating that some engine families may not comply with the RDE legislation standards and raising the
need of a better NOx RDE surveillance, linked to relevant actions where and whenever needed.
- In the project, methods and procedures to detect high-emitting vehicles, both light- and heavy-duty, in real-world traffic have been substantially improved. For instance, there are findings that clearly show that tampering and other reasons for NOx high-emitting trucks to appear on European roads are common even among those that
are legislated to the Euro 6 standard, and even worse for the Euro 5 standard. Further, it has been shown that among light-duty diesel vehicles equipped with diesel particulate filters (DPF), especially the older ones, a significant share has very high emissions of particulate matter expressed as particle number, indicating that their DPFs
are not working properly.
- Through the development of the openCARES software, both data analysis and report writing for remote emission sensing measurement campaigns can be made much easier and at a lower cost.
- CARES has resulted in a number of papers published in scientific journals and presentations at international and national scientific and stakeholder conferences, workshops and seminars - see the CARES website (
https://cares-project.eu/(opens in new window)) for a multitude of examples and in particular the CARES Final Dissemination Report.
- During the whole duration of the project, CARES consortium partners have been involved in several remote sensing campaigns outside the project that may have not come to life without CARES, a nice result in terms of CARES exploitation. Examples are the first ever remote sensing measurements conducted in Germany in Berlin and
Frankfurt, in Brussels and in Sarajevo, and several plume chasing measurements carried out on trucks on highways in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Austria and Belgium (Flanders).
