Evaluation of an all-season gasoline for use in plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

It can currently be observed that plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV) are steadily gaining in importance in terms of sales figures and market share due to the advancing electrification of vehicle drives. This trend will intensify significantly in the coming years with increasing regulation of CO2 emissions from passenger cars. For PHEV applications in passenger cars, fuels are expected to remain in the vehicle tank for much longer periods of time due to continuous improvement in charging infrastructure and battery technology, resulting in seasonal use of fuel grades. This is further complicated by fuel aging processes and additional vapor pressure loss under tank-like storage conditions.
The FVV study "Fuels for PHEV vehicles" from 2019 focused on the investigation of various gasoline and diesel fuels with regard to their stability, aging processes and possible interactions with hardware components of modern fuel injection systems. With regard to the stability of gasoline fuels for PHEV application, a saturation vapor pressure loss (DVPE loss) was essentially observed.
The main idea of the research project is to investigate the applicability of non-seasonal fuels in winter and summer with regard to cold and warm start behaviour. In addition, the superimposed influences of the additional vapour pressure loss and the possible ageing during storage in the vehicle are to be included. This knowledge can thus form a basis for the development of an all-season fuel for PHEV application. For this purpose, a series of current or development fuels on a PHEV-typical DI gasoline engine are investigated for the cold start difficulties and combustion anomalies under normal and extreme boundary conditions.

For achieving the set objectives, the research project aims to investigate the influence of non-seasonal or stored gasoline on a series PHEV type 2.0l. 4 cylinder DI gasoline engine under both normal and extreme boundary conditions will be investigated. The research project is expected to achieve the following development objectives:

• Investigation of the cold and warm start behaviour as well as the running stability of the PHEV gasoline engine under normal and conditioned summer and winter conditions in the context of the WLTC test cycle.


• Investigation of the performance and emissions of the PHEV petrol engine


• Variation of seasonal and developmental fuels (E5-E20) with different saturation vapor pressures (35-90 kPa) of stored and non-stored samples.

IGF application in preparation.