Edinburgh Napier University

  Many studies have confirmed that driving behaviour has a great influence on petrol-fuelled than on diesel-fuelled vehicles. Depending on the type of road and vehicle technology, fuel consumption may increase by up to 40% for aggressive driving compared to normal driving. While aggressive driving especially by motorcyclists in the UK is becoming more and more common practice, a well-defined correlation between driving behaviour due to driver, vehicle, road and traffic and fuel consumption and emissions on the other hand have not yet been established. One possible approach to adopt in order to investigate the relationship between driving behaviour, motorcycle's performance and emissions is to observe various emission rates while driving aggressively, normally or calmly. The role of motorcycle performance is particularly interesting due to the recognized trade off between vehicle performance and certified fuel consumption and because of the known fact that more powerful motorcycles are capable of performing more aggressive driving. This paper analyzes the effects of driving behaviour on motorcycle emissions and fuel consumptions by testing a motorcycle running on a chassis dynamometer under controlled conditions. Firstly, a representative test track was created using a chassis dynamometer to assess the sensitivity of fuel consumption to a wide range of driving patterns. Three types of driving patterns were used based on the rate of acceleration and deceleration levels: average, calm and aggressive driving patterns. For each of these levels motorcycle test runs were carried out in the laboratory. The fuel consumption and emissions were measured at the same time of motorcycle test run and emission factors were predicted also using the TRL emission and fuel coefficients. As per normal driving and aggressive driving, there was little different found in HC, NOx and CO, whereas calm driving shows greater impact on emissions (about 15-17% lower) as compared to emissions emitted during aggressive driving. The results from this study suggest that, reducing speed by changing the driving style in cities would save the amount of fuel and produce lesser emissions. However, the results also show that on an individual basis, the fuel savings achieved from these behaviours would vary significantly as a result of reducing accelerations and/or reducing speeds.