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Many leading companies in the automotive industry have been putting tremendous amount of efforts into developing new designs and technologies to make their products more energy efficient. It is straightforward to evaluate the fuel economy benefit of an individual technology in specific systems and components. However, when multiple technologies are combined and integrated into a whole vehicle, estimating the impact without building and testing an actual vehicle becomes very complex, because the efficiency gains from individual components do not simply add up. In an early concept phase, a projection of fuel efficiency benefits from new technologies will be extremely useful; but in many cases, the outlook has to rely on engineer’s insight since it is impractical to run tests for all possible technology combinations.

A three-dimensional (3-D) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code has been developed to predict flow dynamics and pressure drop characteristics in geometry-modified filters in which the normalized distance of the outlet channel plugs from the inlet has been varied at 0.25, 0.50, and 0.75. In clean filter simulations, the pressure drop in geometry-modified filters showed higher values than for conventional filters because of the significant change in the pressure field formed inside the channel that determines the amount of flow entering the modified channel. This flow through the modified channel depends on plug position initially but has a maximum limit when pressure difference and geometrical change are compromised. For soot loading simulations, a Lagrangian multiphase flow model was used to interpret the hydrodynamics of particle-laden flow with realistic inputs.