Wow, you guys (all of ya') seemed to really trigger on this subject!
First of all, I have no idea what kind of diesel you use with your vehicles. I have now one engine that recently passed 252 000 km (YM 2004), one at 190 000 km (YM 1996) and one at 200 000 km (YM 1983). The intakes are clean, a tiny tiny film of soot. That's all.
Me being 15? No, I'm actually only 13.
They used diesels in mining because the chemical reaction, if you remember high school chemistry, does not result the visciously poisonous (to animals including us) exhaust gas that a gasoline combustion equation does. It has nothing to do with exhaust gas recirculation or one being "cleaner" than the other.
it's LIKE the difference between bleach and solvent. They both clean stuff but very differently.
Yes, I follow you. But the use of the EGR-system was used in mines (at least here, what you did I don't know) to lower the NOx because it caused lung cancer and they did see that the water pumped out from the mines had bad pH-levels, and it was found out to be related to the NOx.
The amount NOx is far lower than the COx. NOx on the other hand is worse for water and land, and that's why there's a Zero-NOx goal for vehicle producers. The debate is now (again here, what happens in the states you know better than me) how and if Urea should be distributed at gas stations. There's more about it at
http://www.volvotrucks.com/trucks/na/en-us/products/engines/epa10/scr/pages/scr.aspx (DEF is water and Urea).
I also have to make my standpoint that the EGR is solely to pass a very useless and pointless emission control test. the fact that it chokes the intake over time reducing fuel economy is more than enough to say it doesn't work. and by work i mean reduce pollution on a bigger scale than over the course of today or tomorrow or this year i mean over the course of the engine's entire life.
As I wrote above, I don't see the choking problem. With the facts I have about NOx compared to COx (I do know it's a give and take with their relation) I want to have a working EGR to lower the NOx. I live in a land with almost 100 000 lakes. I have seen what NOx does with lakes, and with some simple chemistry it was not difficult to see the NOx in the water. That's what I did in high school chemistry classes.
In this car I use quite a lot of biodiesel and in older cars FAME etc actually is reported to make more NOx than on dino fuel. To me it's another reason to use an EGR. There are more facts about in these pub's:
http://alexandria.tue.nl/repository/books/601471.pdfhttp://www.ripublication.com/ijcher1/ijcherv1n1_4.pdfscottmandu mentioned water injection and that was also mentioned by one of the guys at the engine department I spoke to before. Could be another solution, worth checking up more, absolutely. I've been trying to book some hours at a workshop with car test bench and exhaust analysis instruments, but they are really busy so I'm not sure it will happen in months. Would be interesting if I could test it at the same time. Two of the racing teams I have as garage neighbours uses water injection on Porsche's and for power tuning it works for sure.
IMHO if you are enviromentally concious at all you would not want an EGR system on your diesel engine. I have yet to find air quality regulations that actually work. Where I live every vehicle depending on year of manufacturing is required to pass an emissions test. On the older cars they run the exhaust through a contraption that calculates all these things. If your vehicle fails you have to "get it fixed" which usually means buying a new catalytic converter full of minerals that need to be mined in slightly less than enviromentally desired ways OR trash it and buy a new one... I really hope the negative enviromental effect of buying a new car and selling yours to a junk yard (or what ever you do with it) doesn't have to be explained.
This thread reminds me of the "how do i make a blow off valve work on my tdi?" threads.
Well, we have the same thing. Failed test go fix it, that is. And as you say, getting a new car is better. And that's also the reason why I earlier in this thread wrote that if I want to be totally environmentally friendly I wouldn't drive at all. On the other I don't see the reason for that argument, I want to keep the emissions at a reasonable/as-good-as-possible level, why the criticism? EGR's are proved to work, but only if you
not ask an american.