A study has been made of the morphology and crystallography of particulate emissions from indirect injection diesel engines. This particulate matter consists substantially of carbon (although hydrocarbons can be extracted with solvents). Samples were collected in a diluted exhaust stream on amorphous carbon films and examined in a JEM-200C electron microscope operated in the TEM mode with an accelerating voltage of 200 KV.The morphology of the diesel particles, as shown in Fig. 1, markedly resembles carbon blacks and consists of an agglomeration of quasispherical subunits arranged in chains or clusters. Only limited changes in morphology were observed as the number of subunits in the particle increased (although larger particles tended to be more cluster-like than the extended chain shown in Fig. 1). However, a dramatic effect of the number of subunits was observed on the character of the diffraction pattern. Smaller particles yielded a diffraction pattern consisting of very diffuse rings typical of turbostratic carbon; the diffraction patterns from the larger particles, however, although qualitatively similar, exhibited much sharper and less diffuse ring patterns.
