A Numerical Study of fluid flow and Pressure Drop analysis of Catalytic Converter using Commercial CFD code

Abstract

In recent years catalytic converter is a necessary device to achieve low emissions in all the vehicles. This study of the after treatment device is to understand the fluid flow and to optimize the design. It is important to know the pressure drop taking place inside the catalytic converter in order to design the catalytic converter. In this paper, a numerical study has been conducted to study the effect of fluid flow inside the catalytic converter and effect of change in geometry using commercial CFD tool. The working fluid considered in this study is air. A 3D simulation is carried out having straight inlet pipe and with change in inlet pipe angle of the catalytic converter. The monolith substrate region is modeled as a porous medium. The governing equations namely conservation of mass, momentum are used for solving the analysis. The analysis involved determining pressure variation across the geometry of the converter system for different mass flow rates and change inlet pipe angle. The numerical results were used determine the pressure drop across the substrate and the flow characteristics inside the catalytic converter. The numerical study shows good conformance with the experimental results with maximum deviation of error 2.54% for straight inlet pipe configuration. The effect of change in inlet pipe angle, effect of inlet cone angle and effect of splitting the substrate into sections are also presented.