During the last decade, the focus has increasingly been placed on respecting and preserving the environment in which we live. The automotive world, for obvious reasons, has also been affected, and the gaze has been turned both towards renewable energy sources and towards the limitation of pollutant emissions.

One of the key works of the experimenters of the several Car Manufacturers is to precisely optimize the work of internal combustion engines to achieve points of greater efficiency and lower emissions. Anyway, engines working depends on the environmental conditions, such as temperature, humidity, but also according to atmospheric pressure (the latter is a function of altitude).

Being able to perform tests that cover all the environmental ranges that a vehicle finds in its lifetime, allows better calibration and therefore optimization from the point of view of emissions too.

To this end, the project called EACS (Engine Altitude Conditions Simulation) was born, patented by Control Sistem s.r.l. and consisting of an altimetric simulator capable of recreating a controlled environment in terms of psychrometric conditions (temperature, humidity and pressure) to which the combustion air intake and the exhaust of gases of any endothermic engine are interconnected,  so to be able to simulate its travel at different altitudes, with respect to the real altimetric condition of installation.

The system, as conceived by Control Sistem, can be installed in chassis-dyno test cells (vehicle testing), engine test cells or powertrain test cells. In addition to a high precision of regulation of the psychrometric conditions, the other enormous advantage of EACS consists in the fact that there is no need to pressurize the entire test cell, as the engine draws air and expels exhaust gases directly into a pressure-controlled (altitude) environment, working as if it were actually at altitude.

Over the years, starting from the first EACS project, altimetric simulation systems have evolved in different sizes and configurations, up to the creation, for example, of mobile systems (which can be moved from one test cell to another one) or in systems dedicated to the pressurization of the combustion air intake environment of the engine only.