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As greenhouse gas regulations continue to tighten, more opportunities to improve engine efficiency emerge, including exhaust gas heat recovery. Upon cold starts, engine exhaust gases downstream of the catalysts are redirected with a bypass valve into a heat exchanger, transferring its heat to the coolant to accelerate engine warm-up. This has several advantages, including reduced fuel consumption, as the engine’s efficiency improves with temperature. Furthermore, this accelerates readiness to defrost the windshield, improving both safety as well as comfort, with greater benefits in colder climates, particularly when combined with hybridization’s need for engine on-time solely for cabin heating. Such products have been in the market now for several years; however they are bulky, heavy and expensive, yielding opportunities for competitive alternatives.

A novel Spatially Optimized Diffusion Alloy (SODA) material has been developed and applied to exhaust systems, which are an aggressive environment subject to high temperatures and loads, as well as excessive corrosion. Traditional stainless steels disperse chromium homogeneously throughout the material, with varying amounts ranging from 10% to 20% dependent upon its grade (e.g. 409, 436, 439, 441, and 304). SODA steels, however, offer layered concentrations of chromium, enabling an increased amount along the outer surface for much needed corrosion resistance and aesthetics. This outer layer, typically about 70μm thick, exceeds 20% of chromium concentration locally, but is less than 3% in bulk, offering selective placement of the chromium to minimize its overall usage. Since this layer is metallurgically bonded, it cannot delaminate or separate from its core, enabling durable protection throughout manufacturing processes and full useful life.

The low-NOx standard for heavy duty trucks proposed by the California Air Resources Board represents a significant challenge to the engine and aftertreatment system. In this study, exhaust thermal management requirements were quantified using a combination of engine and aftertreatment modeling. First, a 1-D engine model was used to develop a control strategy capable of increasing the exhaust enthalpy and decreasing the engine-out NOx over the initial portion of the cold FTP cycle. The outputs from this model were then used as inputs to a 1-D model of a representative HD aftertreatment system. Several different passive exhaust thermal management technologies were evaluated with this aftertreatment system model, including insulating the downpipe, close-coupling the aftertreatment system, and reducing the thermal inertia of the DOC and DPF; the last option provides the most benefit to early NOx conversion.

Almost one-third of the fuel energy is wasted through the exhaust of a vehicle. An efficient waste heat recovery (WHR) process will undoubtedly lead to improved fuel efficiency and reduced greenhouse gases (GHG) emission. Currently, there are multiple WHR technologies that are being investigated by various entities in the auto industry. One relatively simple device to extract heat energy from the exhaust is a heat exchanger. Heat exchangers are used in some automotive applications to transfer heat from the hot exhaust gas to the colder coolant fluid to raise the coolant temperature. The warmer coolant fluid can be used for several purposes such as; faster heating of the engine’s lubrication oil and transmission fluids during cold starts, and faster cabin heating, which in turn, can potentially improve the overall engine efficiency and reduce exhaust emissions.

The Cu-zeolite (CuZ) SCR catalyst enables higher NOx conversion efficiency in part because it can store a significant amount of NH3. “NH3 storage control”, where diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) is dosed in accord with a target NH3 loading, is widely used with CuZ catalysts to achieve very high efficiency. The NH3 loading actually achieved on the catalyst is currently estimated through a stoichiometric calculation. With future high-capacity CuZ catalyst designs, it is likely that the accuracy of this NH3 loading estimate will become limiting for NOx conversion efficiency. Therefore, a direct measurement of NH3 loading is needed; RF sensing enables this. Relative to RF sensing of soot in a DPF (which is in commercial production), RF sensing of NH3 adsorbed on CuZ is more challenging. Therefore, more attention must be paid to the “microwave resonance cavity” created within the SCR assembly. The objective of this study was to develop design guidelines to enable and enhance RF sensing.

Component bench testing is a basic method to validate the component fatigue life. However, the component bench testing takes long time and is costly. With the development of more powerful computer and CAE simulation techniques, virtual CAE simulation method becomes more important in the component design, optimization, and validation due to its efficiency and low cost. Fatigue life of components of exhaust system is a critical characteristic and it is not deterministic but statistical phenomenon. Thus, a probabilistic approach is necessary. Variations and reliability of fatigue life can be considered in physical testing by testing more samples. However, how to account variations from manufacturing and testing in virtual CAE simulation is a big challenge. In this paper, a virtual CAE fatigue life prediction of components of exhaust system by probabilistic approach is studied and proposed.

Durability and reliability assessment of stress raisers is difficult in testing because the true deformation at a stress raiser often cannot be directly measured. Many approximate engineering approaches have been developed over the last decades, but further fundamental understanding of the problems and the development of more effective engineering methods are still strongly demanded. In this paper, several new concepts and engineering testing approaches are developed and introduced with the emphasis on thermal-fatigue assessment of welded structures.

External Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) has been used on diesel engines for decades and has also been used on gasoline engines in the past. It is recently reintroduced on gasoline engines to improve fuel economy at mid and high engine load conditions, where EGR can reduce throttling losses and fuel enrichment. Fuel enrichment causes fuel penalty and high soot particulates, as well as hydrocarbon (HC) emissions, all of which are limited by emissions regulations. Under stoichiometric conditions, gasoline engines can be operated at high EGR rates (> 20%), but more than diesel engines, its intake gas including external EGR needs extreme cooling (down to ~50°C) to gain the maximum fuel economy improvement. However, external EGR and its problems at low temperatures (fouling, corrosion & condensation) are well known.

Recent stringent government regulations on emission control and fuel economy drive the vehicles and their associated components and systems to the direction of lighter weight. However, the achieved lightweight must not be obtained by sacrificing other important performance requirements such as manufacturability, strength, durability, reliability, safety, noise, vibration and harshness (NVH). Additionally, cost is always a dominating factor in the lightweight design of automotive products. Therefore, a successful lightweight design can only be accomplished by better understanding the performance requirements, the potentials and limitations of the designed products, and by balancing many conflicting design parameters. The combined knowledge-based design optimization procedures and, inevitably, some trial-and-error design iterations are the practical approaches that should be adopted in the lightweight design for the automotive applications.

Vehicle exhaust components and systems under fatigue loading often show multiple failure modes, which should be treated, at least theoretically, with rigorous advanced bi-modal and multi-modal statistical theories and approaches. These advanced methods are usually applied to mission-critical engineering applications such as nuclear and aerospace, in which large amounts of test data are often available. In the automotive industry, however, the sample size adopted in the product validation is usually small, thus the bi-modal and multi-modal phenomena cannot be distinguished with certainty.

Fatigue life assessment is an integral part of the durability and reliability evaluation process of vehicle exhaust components and systems. The probabilistic life assessment approaches, including analytical, experimental, and simulation, CAE implementation in particular, are attracting significant attentions in recent years. In this paper, the state-of-the-art probabilistic life assessment methods for vehicle exhausts under combined thermal and mechanical loadings are reviewed and investigated. The loading cases as experienced by the vehicle exhausts are first categorized into isothermal fatigue, anisothermal fatigue, and high-temperature thermomechanical fatigue (TMF) based on the failure mechanisms. Subsequently, the probabilistic life assessment procedures for each category are delineated, with emphasis on product validation.

Strength and fatigue life prediction is very difficult for stamped structural steel parts because the manufacturing process alters the localized material properties. Traditional tensile tests cannot be used to obtain material properties due to size limitations. Because of this, FEA predictions are most often “directional” at best. In this paper an improved prediction methodology is suggested. With a material library developed from standard homogenous test specimens, or even textbook material property tables, localized strength and plastic strain numbers can be inferred from localized hardness tests(1). The new method, using standard ABAQUS static analysis (not commercial fatigue analysis software with many unknowns), is shown to be very accurate. This paper compares the new process FEA strength and fatigue life predictions to laboratory test results using statistical confidence intervals.

Fatigue testing and related fatigue life assessment are essential parts of the design and validation processes of vehicle components and systems. Fatigue bench test is one of the most important testing methods for durability and reliability assessment, and its primary function is to construct design curves based on a certain amount of repeated tests, with which recommendations on product design can be advised. How to increase the accuracy of predictions from test results, the associated life assessment, and to reduce the cost through reducing test sample size is an active and continuous effort. In this paper the current engineering practices on constructing design curves for fatigue test data are reviewed first.

The Diesel engine combustion process results in harmful exhaust emissions, mainly composed of Particulate Matter (PM), Hydro Carbon (HC), Carbon monoxide (CO) and Nitrogen Oxides (NOx). Several technologies have been developed in the past decades to control these diesel emissions. One of the promising and well matured technology of reducing NOx is to implement Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) using ammonia (NH3) as the reducing agent. For an effective SCR system, the aqueous urea solutions should be fully decomposed into ammonia and it should be well distributed across the SCR. In the catalyst, all the ammonia is utilized for NOx reduction process. In the design stage, it is more viable to implement Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for design iterations to determine an optimized SCR system based on SCR flow distribution. And in later stage, experimental test is required to predict the after-treatment system performance based on NOx reduction.

Catalysts and filters continue to be applied widely to meet particulate matter regulations across new and retrofit diesel engines. Soot management of the filter continues to be enhanced, including regeneration methodologies. Concerns regarding in-cylinder post-injection of fuel for active regeneration increases interests in directly injecting this fuel into the exhaust. Performance of secondary fuel injection layouts is discussed, and sensitivities on thermal uniformity are measured and analyzed, providing insight to packaging challenges and methods to characterize and improve application designs. Influences of end cone geometries, mixers, and injector mounting positions are quantified via thermal distribution at each substrate's outlet. A flow laboratory is applied for steady state characterization, repeated on an engine dynamometer, which also provides transient results across the NRTC.

Great efforts have been made to develop the ability to accurately and quickly predict the durability and reliability of vehicles in the early development stage, especially for welded joints, which are usually the weakest locations in a vehicle system. A reliable and validated life assessment method is needed to accurately predict how and where a welded part fails, while iterative testing is expensive and time consuming. Recently, structural stress methods based on nodal force/moment are becoming widely accepted in fatigue life assessment of welded structures. There are several variants of structural stress approaches available and two of the most popular methods being used in automotive industry are the Volvo method and the Verity method. Both methods are available in commercial software and some concepts and procedures related the nodal force/moment have already been included in several engineering codes.

To meet the 2010 diesel engine emission regulations, an aftertreatment system was developed to reduce HC, CO, NOx and soot. In NOx reduction, a baseline SCR module was designed to include urea injector, mixing decomposition tube and SCR catalysts. However, it was found that the baseline decomposition tube had unacceptable urea mixing performance and severe deposit issues largely because of poor hardware design. The purpose of this article is to describe necessary development work to improve the baseline system to achieve desired mixing targets. To this end, an emissions Flow Lab and computational fluid dynamics were used as the main tools to evaluate urea mixing solutions. Given the complicated urea spray transport and limited packaging space, intensive efforts were taken to develop pre-injector pipe geometry, post-injector cone geometry, single mixer design modifications, and dual mixer design options.

Automotive exhaust system is supported by the hanger rods welded to it. Tenneco validates the structural integrity of these joints to customer specific reliability and confidence targets. As part of that validation, it is common to hold part of the exhaust system and apply constant amplitude, fully-reversed load on the hanger rod and perform a fatigue test till there is a failure somewhere in the toe of the weld or in the hanger rod. The exhaust system is designed, engineered and manufactured per system design specification of the customer. In an exhaust system program life cycle, the same fatigue test is performed on Prototype and Production parts. The same test is also performed on an additional batch of Pre-Production parts in the current case. Prototype, pre-production and production parts are referred here as Design Verification (DV), Pre-Production Verification (PPV) and Process Verification (PV) tests and parts.

With introductions of stringent diesel engine emission regulations, the DOC and DPF systems have become the mainstream technology to eliminate soot particles through diesel combustion under various operation conditions. Urea-based SCR has been the mainstream technical direction to reduce NOx emissions. For both technologies, low-temperature conditions or cold start conditions pose challenges to activate DOC or SCR emission-reduction performance. To address this issue, mini or full flow burner systems may be used to increase exhaust temperature to reach DOC light-off or SCR initiation temperature by combustion of diesel fuel. In essence, the burner systems incorporate a fuel injector, spray atomization, proper fuel / air mixing mechanisms, and combustion control as independent heat sources.

Driven by diesel engine emission regulation, more emission aftertretment products have been under development by Tenneco to address the Particular Matter (PM) and NOx reduction needs. The T.R.U.E. (Thermal Regeneration Unit for Exhaust) Clean active thermal management system is one of the examples to reduce PM. The system is designed to increase exhaust temperatures for DPF (Diesel Particulate Filter) regeneration. This product is exposed to high temperature and high oxidation. Therefore, thermal fatigue, creep, oxidation and the interaction become critical mechanism to be considered for its durability. One of the key challenges to validate this product is to find a way of accelerated testing for thermal, creep, and oxidation as well as for vibration. In this paper, accelerated durability test strategy for high temperature device like T.R.U.E Clean is addressed.