Assessing emission levels for construction machinery, marine engines, buses, and other vehicles under realistic use conditions has quickly become a popular topic in recent news. The Nanoparticle Emission Tester (3795 NPET) from TSI was manufactured for this application purpose, which is compliant to the non-road mobile machinery (NRMM) testing protocol defined by Swiss regulation 941.242.

For applications with extremely high particle concentrations, for example in diesel engines not equipped with DPFs, the High-Concentration NPET (3795-HC) was recently developed, and it is used to measure total solid particle concentrations upstream and downstream of engines with DPFs or GPFs, cold start emissions, or biomass combustion emissions beyond the constraints of the current Swiss regulation.

In Germany, the solid particle emissions from wood burning stoves can also be measured with the HC-NPET for meeting the requirements of the German Blue Angel certification ecolabel. Measures in recent years to improve the representativeness of engine and vehicle testing protocols compared to real-world conditions and to identify vehicles with high emissions has led to the demand for Periodic Technical Inspections (PTI). The implementation of a PTI program for vehicles in several European countries, requires a lower cost, rugged, fast, and simple-to-use solid particle counter that can be deployed in the thousands of emission testing garages throughout these countries. The Dutch government has recently issued regulations for inspection of in-use diesel particle filters using particle number instruments, effective 1 January 2020.