Argonne National Laboratory and Progress Rail researching biofuels for rail

In Illinois, building on their 25-year relationship, the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Progress Rail, a Caterpillar company, are researching a variety of biodiesel and renewable diesel fuels with the goal of lowering the carbon intensity of the fuels used in the U.S. freight rail industry.

The DOE and the Federal Railroad Administration are contributing to the three-phase research project with $750,000 in research grants. The project started in 2022 and will be completed this year.

Argonne scientists will investigate biodiesel and renewable diesel fuel on a single-cylinder locomotive test engine provided by Progress Rail. Scientists will work at Argonne’s Engine Research Facility, which is home to two EMD® diesel locomotive test engines.

In the first phase of the project, Argonne scientists are using the Lab’s high performance computing resources provided by the Bebop cluster in Argonne’s Laboratory Computing Resource Center to create a modeling framework of different combustion systems that improve on existing models. In the second phase, scientists will use these models to build the single-cylinder engine to test at Argonne.

In the final phase, Argonne scientists will test a variety of bio- and renewable diesel fuels on the test engine’s operating cycle, measuring performance parameters including torque, power, engine thermal efficiency and exhaust emissions. Progress Rail is providing hardware and technical support throughout the project.