A Concept for On-Road Inter-Laboratory Correlation Exercises with Portable Emission Measurement Systems (PEMS)

Portable emission measurement systems (PEMS) are used onboard vehicles to determine the on-road real driving emissions of the vehicles for research or regulatory purposes. The assessment of a PEMS is carried out in a laboratory comparing it with laboratory grade systems (i.e., validation test). This procedure is described in the European Commission Regulation (EU) 2017/1151 and there are limits that must be respected (permissible tolerances). A few inter-laboratory studies evaluated PEMS in the laboratories of different institutes. However, there are no on-road inter-laboratory studies of PEMS because there is no reference instrument available and the source (i.e., emissions of the vehicle) fluctuates significantly due to the variation of the trip characteristics, driver behavior, and environmental conditions, making meaningful evaluation challenging. Here, we present a concept of how such inter-laboratory studies could take place. The concept is that a ‘reference PEMS’ is evaluated first in the laboratory of one of the participating institutes. Then, the ‘reference PEMS’, with a reference vehicle (optionally) is sent to the other institutes to compare their ‘test PEMS’ with the ‘reference PEMS’ on-road. The difference (absolute or relative) of the two PEMS, corrected for any ‘bias’ of the ‘reference PEMS’, is used for the assessment of the ‘test PEMS’ (i.e., comparison with the permissible tolerances) or any statistical analysis (e.g., z-scores). Ideally, the selected reference PEMS should have negligible ‘bias’ (e.g., due to calibration uncertainties, drift), and for this reason, a thorough investigation at the beginning of the exercise is highly recommended. A statistical analysis can be made to confirm if there is bias. Using the differences (absolute or relative) of PEMS, the source (vehicle emissions) variability is cancelled out. The differences can then be compared with the permissible tolerances of the regulation, but up to 40% higher deviations should still be acceptable. We demonstrate the concept with experiments in our institute.