Richard Riley

Project Title: Analysis of Real World Emissions and Powertrain Modelling to Create Model Specific Emissions Data that Represents Real World Conditions

Background

Richard graduated in 2011 from Leeds University with a BEng (hons) in Energy and Environmental Engineering. During this time he worked on projects looking at the production of ethanol from corn in America and the potential use of microalgae for fuel and chemical production within a closed cycle bio-refinery. Leading on from this work he did a 6 month placement researching methods for growing and processing microalgae into biodiesel. In 2011/2012 he did an MSc in Low Carbon Technologies at the University of Leeds. Here he took the opportunity to continue working on aspects of personal transport with research in the areas of hydrogen fuel cells, personal transport in developing cities and the effect of public choice on transport emissions in the UK.

PhD Research

Richard’s PhD involves modelling of petrol, diesel and hybrid powertrains in the Matlab/Simulink modelling environment, with the aim of studying how the powertrain design effects the vehicles fuel consumption under a wide range of operating conditions. Currently in Europe vehicles are tested for fuel consumption on a chassis dynamometer over a pre-determined speed time trace. It is well understood in academia and industry that this testing procedure does not represent real world fuel consumption. This has two undesirable effects, first it means that the information displayed to consumers at point of purchase is inaccurate and second manufacturers are designing cars to have low fuel consumption under the conditions of the test rather than optimising cars to perform well under real world conditions. From his PhD research Richard hopes to provide accurate consumer specific, fuel consumption information about a range of powertrain options and to look at optimising powertrain design for different real world operating conditions.