In a back corner of Cobo Hall during the SAE Congress this week, we came upon the Emitec booth featuring the company's line of diesel filters. We spoke with Markus Downey, an application engineer at Emitec, about what makes these filters different from others on the market, and you can listen to our talk by clicking on the audio widget player below.

Emitec produces a partial flow filter (as opposed to a wall flow filter) made of metal and uses a passively regenerated cleaning system. This means that the soot collected from the exhaust is catalytically combusted with NO₂ generated upstream in the engine. Downey explained that the benefit to this system is a more stable operating system, which makes it easier to be retrofitted. The DPFs can be used on large diesel engines (i.e., buses or trucks) or on diesel engines in smaller passenger cars. Some companies, like MAN, use Emitec filters as a first-fit. Downey said that most of the company's testing is done in Europe using ULSD, but he figures that a standardized biodiesel - should such a thing ever be widely available - would not pose a problem for the Emitec filters.



Emitec's press release is pasted after the jump. (UPDATE: updated release)

Finally the European Parliament has passed a new directive, called "Air quality," which creates a plan to improve the air Europeans breathe. The plan is a very promising piece of legislation, albeit complex: it has gathered four previous directives into a single bit of legislation.

Basically, the directive defines maximum pollution levels and a timeframe for its implementation. Which type of pollutants? A lot of them, but the focus has been set on microparticulates PM 2.5, which are considered dangerous for human health as they cause respiratory problems. However, these particulates don't come only from diesel vehicles tailpipes. Phenomena such as volcanic eruptions can release a huge amount of them into the atmosphere.

The directive's dates are as follows:

• 2010: a recommended value of 25 µg/m³ of PM 2.5 particules.
• 2015: for this level to be mandatory and a recommended value for 2020 of 20 µg/m³ of PM 2.5 in the air. These levels can only be surpassed 35 times per year, which is something very hard to meet for industrial regions such as the north of Italy.

Estimates say that diesel cars are responsible of 20 percent of these emissions but the new EURO V rule will practically ban particulates from such vehicles, thanks to the installation of Diesel Particulate Filters (already standard in vehicles such as the Fiat 500 pictured above).

[Source: Legislation via Moteur Nature]