Raman Spectroscopy of Diesel and Gasoline Engine-Out Soot

We studied engine-out soot samples collected from a heavy-duty direct-injection diesel engine and a port-fuel injection gasoline spark-ignition engine. The two types of soot samples were characterized using Raman spectroscopy with different laser power. A Matlab program using least-square-method with trust-region-reflective algorithm was developed for curve fitting. We used a DOE (design of experiments) method to avoid local convergence. This method was used for two-band fitting and three-band fitting. The fitting results were used to determine the intensity ratio of D and G Raman bands. We find that high laser power may cause oxidation of soot samples, which gives higher D/G intensity ratio. Diesel soot has consistently higher amorphous/graphitic carbon ratio and thus higher oxidation reactivity, in comparison to gasoline soot, which is reflected by the higher D/G intensity ratio in Raman spectra measured under the same laser power.