Search Results

Evolving marine diesel emission regulations drive significant reductions of nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions. There is, therefore, considerable interest to develop and validate Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) converters for marine diesel NOx emission control. Substrates in marine applications need to be robust to survive the high sulfur content of marine fuels and must offer cost and pressure drop benefits. In principle, extruded honeycomb substrates of higher cell density offer benefits on system volume and provide increased catalyst area (in direct trade-off with increased pressure drop). However higher cell densities may become more easily plugged by deposition of soot and/or sulfate particulates, on the inlet face of the monolithic converter, as well as on the channel walls and catalyst coating, eventually leading to unacceptable flow restriction or suppression of catalytic function.

Exhaust systems traditionally require a specific amount of muffler volume to reduce sound levels appropriately. However, as hybridization evolves, the packaging area becomes smaller, reducing available muffler space and requiring alternative solutions to attenuate exhaust sound with less volume. Passive exhaust valves are a key solution, leveraging the physics of the exhaust (flow, temperature, and pressure) to cycle the valve. Passive exhaust valves typically operate in a closed position under low-flow conditions (low engine speeds and loads), which helps to reduce low-frequency boom, moderately increasing backpressure when it is not detrimental to engine efficiency. Conversely, under higher engine speed and load operating conditions, when exhaust flow increases and backpressure is critical to achieve desired power output, the passive valve opens to reduce its impact.

Diesel burners introduce combustion of diesel fuel to raise exhaust gas temperature to Diesel Oxidization Catalyst (DOC) light-off or Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) regeneration conditions, thereby eliminating the need of engine measures such as post-injections. Such diesel combustion requirement nevertheless poses challenges to burner development especially in combustion control and risk mitigation of DPF material failure. In particular, burner design must satisfy good soot distribution and heat distribution at DPF front face after meeting minimum requirements of ignition, heat release, and backpressure. In burner development, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models have been developed based on commercial codes for burner thermal and flow management with capability of predicting comprehensive physical and chemical phenomena including turbulence induced mixing, fuel injection, fuel droplet transport, diesel combustion, radiation, conjugate heat transfer and etc.

2010 and future EPA regulations introduce stringent Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) reduction targets for diesel engines. Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) of NOx by Urea over catalyst has become one of the main solutions to achieve these aggressive reductions. As such, urea solution is injected into the exhaust gas, evaporated and decomposed to ammonia via mixing with the hot exhaust gas before passing through an SCR catalyst. Urea mixers, in this regard, are crucial to ensure successful evaporation and mixing since its liquid state poses significant barriers, especially at low temperature conditions that incur undesired deposits. Intensive efforts have been taken toward developing such urea mixers, and multiple criteria have been derived for them, mainly including NOx reduction efficiency and uniformity. In addition, mixers must also satisfy other requirements such as low pressure drop penalty, mechanical strength, material integrity, low cost, and manufacturability.

An active diesel particulate filter (DPF) regeneration system is evaluated, which applies secondary fuel injection (SFI) directly within the exhaust system upstream of a diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC). Diesel fuel is oxidized in the presence of a proprietary catalyst system, increasing exhaust gas temperatures in an efficient and controlled manner, even during low engine-out gas temperatures. The exotherms produced by secondary fuel injection (SFI) have been evaluated using two different DOC volumes and platinum catalyst loadings. DOC light-off temperatures were measured using SFI under steady-state conditions on an engine dynamometer. A ΔT method was used for the light-off temperature measurements – i.e., the minimum DOC inlet gas temperature at which the exothermic reaction increases the outlet gas temperature 20°C or greater than the inlet temperature.

Diesel burners recently have been used in Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) regeneration process, in which the exhaust gas temperature is raised through the combustion process to burn off the soot particles. The feasibility of such process using the burner in large diesel applications is investigated along with a mixer and DPF. For such applications, only partial flow of the exhaust stream is fed into the burner and the resulting hot flow from combustion process is then mixed with the rest of the main stream. The amount of flow into the burner plays a vital role in overall system performance as it determines the amount of hot gas needed for Diesel Oxidation Catalyst (DOC) light-off (to facilitate DPF regeneration) and also oxygen amount needed for secondary combustion. A passive valve plate design is proposed for such flow split applications for the burner.

In order to satisfy tightening global emissions regulations, diesel truck manufacturers are striving to meet increasingly stringent Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) reduction standards. The majority of heavy duty diesel trucks have integrated urea SCR NOx abatement strategies. To this end, aftertreatment systems need to be properly engineered to achieve high conversion efficiencies. A EuroV intent urea SCR system is evaluated and failed to meet NOx conversion targets with severe urea deposit formation. Systematic enhancements of the design have been performed to enable it to meet targets, including emission reduction efficiency via improved reagent mixing, evaporation, distribution, back pressure, and removing of urea deposits. Multiple urea mixers, injector mounting positions and various system layouts are developed and evaluated, including both CFD analysis and full scale laboratory tests.

With increasing applications of urea SCR for NOx emission reduction, improving the system performance and durability has become a high priority. A typical urea SCR system includes a urea injector, injector housing, mixer, and appropriate pipe configurations to allow continuous urea injection into the exhaust stream and evaporation of urea solution into gaseous products. Continuous operation at various conditions with high NOx reduction is possible, but one problem that threatens the life and performance of these systems is urea deposit. When urea or its byproducts become deposited on the inner surfaces of the system including walls, mixers, injector housings and substrates it can create concerns of backpressure and material deteriorations. In addition, deposits as a waste of reagents can negatively affect engine operation, emissions performance and DEF economy. Urea deposit behavior is explored in terms of heat transfer, pipe geometry, injector layout and mixing mechanisms.

The presented work evaluates several mixer designs being considered for use in large Diesel exhaust aftertreatment systems. The mixers are placed upstream of a diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC) in the exhaust system, where a liquid hydrocarbon fuel is injected. DOC exothermic behaviour resulting from each mixer at different operating conditions is evaluated. A gas flow bench equipped with a XY-Table measurement system is used to determine gas velocity, temperature, and hydrocarbon species uniformity, as well as, pressure drop. Experimental mixer data obtained from a flow bench and an engine dynamometer are compared and discussed. The experimental methodology used in this study can be used to evaluate mixers via comprehensive testing.

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.

It is important to quantitatively characterize the automotive events in order to not only accurately interpret their past but also to reliably predict and forecast their short-term, medium-term, and even long-term future. In this paper, several automotive industry related events, i.e. vehicle safety, vehicle weight/HP ratio, the emissions of CO2, HC, CO, and NOx, are analyzed to find their general trends. Exponential and power law functions are used to empirically fit and quantitatively characterize these data with an emphasis on the two functions’ effectiveness in predictability. Finally, three empirical emission laws based on the historical HC, CO, and NOx data are proposed and the impact of these laws on emission control is discussed.

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.

Water injection (WI) can improve gasoline engine performance and efficiency, and on-board water recovery technology could eliminate the need for customers to refill an on-board water reservoir. In this regard, the technical feasibility of exhaust water recovery (EWR) is described in this paper. Water injection testing was conducted at a full load condition (5000 rpm/18.1 bar BMEP) and a high load condition (3000 rpm/14.0 bar BMEP) on a turbocharged gasoline direction injection (GTDI) engine. Water recovery testing was conducted both after the exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler and after the charge air cooler (CAC) at a high load (3000 rpm/14.0 bar BMEP), as well as a part load (2080 rpm/6.8 bar BMEP) condition, at temperatures ca. 10-15 °C below the dew point of the flow stream. Three types of water separation designs were tested: a passive cyclone separator (CS), a passive membrane separator (MEM), and an active separator (AS).

This study investigates the passive regeneration behavior of diesel particulate filters (DPFS) with various PGM loadings under different engine operating conditions. Four wall-flow DPFs are used; one uncoated and three wash-coated with low, medium, and high PGM loadings, with and without an upstream diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC). DPFs with variable pre-soot loads are evaluated at two steady state temperatures (300°C and 400°C), as well as across three levels of transients based on the 13-mode ESC cycle. Passive regeneration rates are calculated based on pre and post soot gravimetric measurements along with accumulated soot mass rates for specified exhaust mass flow rates and temperatures. Results illustrate the effect of temperature, NO₂ content, and soot loading on passive regeneration without upstream DOCs or DPF wash coatings.

A series of novel metal-oxide (TiO2, TiO2-SiO2)-supported Mn, Fe, Co, V, Cu and Ce catalysts were prepared by incipient wetness technique and investigated for the low-temperature selective catalytic reduction (SCR) of NOx with ammonia at industrial relevantly conditions. Among all the prepared catalysts, Cu/TiO2 showed superior de-NOx performance in the temperature range of 150-200 °C followed by Mn/TiO2 in the temperature range of 200-250 °C. The Ce/TiO2 catalyst exhibited a broad temperature window with notable de-NOx performance in the temperature regime of 250-350 °C. The phyico-chemical characterization results revealed that the activity enhancement was correlated with the properties of the support material. All the anatasetitania-supported catalysts (M/TiO2 (Hombikat)) demonstrated significantly high de-NOx performance above 150 °C.

The main objective of this work is to develop a low-temperature SCR catalyst for the reduction of nitrogen oxides at cold start, low-idle and low-load conditions. A series of metal oxide- incorporated beta zeolite catalysts were prepared by adopting incipient wetness technique, cation-exchange, deposition-precipitation and other synthesis techniques. The resulting catalysts were characterized and tested for reduction of NOx in a fixed bed continuous flow quartz micro-reactor using ammonia as the reductant gas. Initial catalyst formulations have been exhibited good NOx reduction activity at low-temperatures. These catalyst formulations showed a maximum NOx conversion in the temperature range of 100 - 350°C. Besides, more experiments were performed with the aim of optimizing these formulations with respect to the metal atomic ratio, preparation method, active components and supported metal type.

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.

New emissions standards for oxides of nitrogen (NOx) in on-road diesel vehicles are effective in 2010, and a common approach applies urea selective catalytic reduction (SCR). Urea is injected into the exhaust and decomposes to form ammonia, which chemically reacts with NOx as it passes through an SCR catalyst. Ammonia is corrosive and negatively affects typical stainless steels used in exhaust applications, but these corrosive impacts have not yet been quantified in an exhaust system. Two unique corrosion tests are performed on a number of various stainless steel samples, illustrating such performance concerns with 409, while offering alternatives with much better performance, including cost-effective options. The method applied is described, yielding performance criteria through appearance, weight loss, and corrosion pit depth.

Nearly a third of the fuel energy is wasted through the exhaust of a vehicle. An efficient waste heat recovery process will undoubtedly lead to improved fuel efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Currently, there are multiple waste heat recovery technologies that are being investigated in the auto industry. One innovative waste heat recovery approach uses Thermoacoustic Converter (TAC) technology. Thermoacoustics is the field of physics related to the interaction of acoustic waves (sonic power) with heat flows. As in a heat engine, the TAC produces electric power where a temperature differential exists, which can be generated with engine exhaust (hot side) and coolant (cold side). Essentially, the TAC converts exhaust waste heat into electricity in two steps: 1) the exhaust waste heat is converted to acoustic energy (mechanical) and 2) the acoustic energy is converted to electrical energy.