Mr. Speaker, it is a pleasure to speak about the environment. In the natural environment everything is related to everything else. Looking at the hydrostatic cycle for instance, when water evaporates and goes up in the atmosphere, it mixes with all kinds of contaminants and then comes back to earth.
Photochemical smog is caused by the reaction of sunlight with nitrogen oxide, particularly in Los Angeles which is in a valley. Los Angeles is a good example because it has more cars than any other place. I am not sure exactly why it does not have any mass transit systems. I have visited Los Angeles quite often and I know the damage to the environment is bad. It is broadcast over the radio every day that there is eye irritation from smog, or that people with respiratory problems should stay off the streets.
I am going to address the onboard diagnostic equipment. Most members probably do not have the technical knowledge I have. I understand what they are saying about MMT, that an infinitesimal amount of nitrogen oxide will be emitted. However, I make the case that it could be controlled by installing devices on the vehicles.
I will begin by speaking about what happens in a car. A person gets in a car and turns it on which uses gasoline. Gasoline has potential energy of 19,000 British thermal units per pound or per pint, depending on the kind it is. The gasoline is control burned in a vehicle resulting in pressure, forcing a piston down, turning the crankshaft, making a circular motion to the power take-off to drive the wheels which propel us along the road.
In a four stroke cycle engine the air comes into the engine through an intake manifold with the intake valve and opens the piston moving down to the bottom of the cylinder, causing a vacuum in the cylinder. Injectors in this case, or if it is a carburetted engine a venturi effect would cause aspirated air in a stoichiometric ratio, which is about 14 parts of air to one part of gasoline by weight, or 9,000 parts of air to one part of gasoline by volume. That is what the computer will try to monitor by what is called a map sensor. Placed somewhere in the intake system of the vehicle is a piece of foil which takes a certain amount of temperature. That foil knows exactly the volume of air which is going into the engine. The injectors are monitored by a computer which says: "I have this amount of cubic feet of air. Give me this amount of gasoline".
During deceleration periods, for instance on old carburetted engines coming down the hill with the throttle closed, a very large vacuum is created and the gasoline gets very rich. Those kinds of cars create a lot of pollution. On a modern car the system shuts off completely because of the onboard diagnostic system. There is absolutely no gasoline getting in, so it works quite well.
On the intake stroke, the piston moves down and the cylinder is charged. The next stroke is the compression stroke. Both valves are closed, the piston moves up and it compresses the thing to about a tenth of its value. Because we are trying to get rid of nitrogen oxide, we have had to lower the compression ratio of engines. By lowering the compression ratio and bringing the temperature up, we can control nitrogen oxide as well.
The piston comes up and compresses the gas into 10 per cent of its original volume. A sparkplug triggers it at a particular time. The timing is changed depending on the rate of speed in order to ensure that when the actual expansion of the gasoline occurs, when the pressure builds up, it reaches a certain angle on the crank. If it happens before or after, the engine fights against itself and it
actually loses its power. The sparkplug is triggered to fire at a precise time, again by a computer.
The process takes place very quickly. An engine running at 4,000 RPM has 2,000 power strokes per RPM. If we divide that by 60, we will get about 33 sparks per second. The process would last for maybe one-thirtieth of a second. We can see the process happening very quickly. What happens is that all of that stuff escapes and goes into the exhaust system. It has to be monitored by a three way muffler, which I will talk about in a minute.
The last stroke is the exhaust stroke. The piston moves from the bottom to the centre, coming up with the intake valve closed and the exhaust valve open. The piston pushes the gasoline out of the tailpipe.
In the tailpipe there is a catalytic converter. In that catalytic converter is rhodium. Rhodium actually removes oxygen. There is platinum and palladium. Palladium actually adds oxygen. If we had H2 coming out and we wanted to change it to something else, we would add O. We could add O by using an air pump, which is seen on some cars, or we could add O by using a computer triggered diverter to pass the exhaust gases over the platinum, adding oxygen, and now we would have H2O. We have two sets of oxygen instead of one, which changes it into water. If we have CO, for instance, which is carbon monoxide and we want to change it to harmless carbon dioxide, we add O and get CO2. We have two Os.
This is what the diagnostic pieces of equipment are doing. These speak in hertz. They go back and forth and report to the computer exactly what is happening. If there is a knock in the engine, then the computer knows and it will trigger the spark and retard or advance the spark.
If the contaminants coming from the tailpipe are one thing or another, the oxygen sensor in this particular case will pick it up, tell the computer it is getting too many hydrocarbons and the computer will tell the injector to shut off. That is what we are talking about when we talk about onboard diagnostics.
In the onboard diagnostics, there are things like an EGR valve. An EGR valve is used particularly to control nitrogen oxide. As I have said before, nitrogen oxide is the thing we talk about a lot. We say it is the main smog producer.
One of the ways manufacturers get rid of nitrogen oxide is by using exhaust gas recirculation. The unburned gas out of the engine is recycled back through some mechanisms inside the engine and are burned again. The effect of burning it with the rest of the fuel that is in the engine drops the combustion chamber temperature. By dropping the combustion chamber temperature, it reduces the oxides of nitrogen.
The NOx is also reduced from earlier emissions by using a heat stove. You might have seen on cars where there is an intake manifold and there is actually a heat stove. The heat stove allows either hot air to come off the exhaust pipe directly into the engine or it may mix. At some point in time hot air comes up past the exhaust pipe because it gets some heat off of it and some of it comes in through the snorkel. The two are mixed before the air gets into the engine. On a cold engine it makes the engine warm up very quickly.
On modern cars, the onboard diagnostics trigger what is called an open loop system. Most everyone knows that when you get in a car, you do not pump the gas and do all those kinds of things we did with older cars which had carburettors on them. The reason we do not do that is that the computer and the onboard diagnostics monitor everything. It monitors the temperature. It knows if the engine is cold. If you come out and it is minus 20 degrees, it knows that the crankshaft is not turning because it is not picking up any RPM due to a magnetic device which is triggering it.
The oxygen sensor indicates it has pure oxygen and the computer reports back in hertz very quickly, the same as brand new computers here, where the speed gets quicker. On these cars the onboard diagnostics are getting very, very quick in corresponding with one another. That is why there is talk about the effects of this onboard diagnostics.
Imagine an exhaust sensor for instance in the exhaust system. If certain kinds of additives are used in the gasoline and it catches and interferes with the way it records or sends the information back to the computer, it would affect the way the car works. Of course, if it affects it then it triggers other things. What would happen is we would actually get more pollution than if we were using MMT because the thing is not working right.
The onboard diagnostic equipment is very important to us. Onboard diagnostic equipment must be added to cars.
I recently purchased a new car and I have a book here to monitor it. We have to closely monitor the new equipment. Instead of miles per gallon we are getting litres per kilometre. We have to get the amount of kilometres and divide it by 100. For instance, on my new car I am getting about 10.5 litres per 100 kilometres, which is about 27 miles to the gallon. If I am getting 8.5 litres per 100 kilometres, I am getting something like 33 miles per gallon.
We will find that the new vehicles are more fuel efficient than the old ones. The consumer will benefit with onboard diagnostic equipment. Canadians need to have the onboard diagnostic equipment. We do have this argument with fuels, but that argument should be between the automotive manufacturers and the fuel companies, and not this House.