EGR for Biodiesels

To reduce the use of fossil fuels and limit the emissions of vehicles a lot of manufacturers are looking into the feasibility of electric vehicles. In my opinion this is a good thing and the evolution in EV technology is very important for our future. However there is also another alternative to reduce the emissions of our vehicles and make our transport more sustainable, this is the use of biofuels or biodiesels instead of traditional fossil fuels. While biodiesels are renewable and offer potential reduction in CO and HC emissions due to higher O2 contents in vegetable oil many research studies have reported that exhaust from biodiesel fuel has higher NOx emissions. To solve this it is important to include an exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) system because this is still the most efficient way to reduce the amount of NOx in the exhaust gases. In this research paper they studied the impact of an EGR system in a diesel engine that runs on sunflower oil methyl ester. They found that they could decrease the NOx in the emissions but that they are still higher for the sunflower oil compared to normal diesel. But with the implementation of the sunflower oil the emissions of unburnt hydro carbon and CO are much lower compared to normal diesel.

Is this technology worth the time and money to investigate further our would it be better to put all our focus in the development of electric vehicles?

Importance of Statistics in Research

After conducting parts of our experiments and tests we were asked to check the statistical significance of our results. With only our basic knowledge from our course of statistics we noticed that there was much more to it than we thought. But what is now the importance of statistics in research and how often is it used in a more practical environment. We quickly learned that it was used very frequently in our thesis company ‘Sensata’ and that most big companies have a special division specialized in statistics.

Statistics however is something tricky, and has to be done correctly if you want an honest conclusion out of your results. Like Mark Twain once said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” And in the past there has been many examples where this was the case, like biased samples, overgeneralization and falsified results in particular.

We therefor try to conduct our statistical analysis as correct as possible, not with the goal to conclude what we want but what is true.