Abstract
Industries’ air pollution causes serious challenges to modern society, among them exhaust gases from internal combustion engines, which are currently one of the main sources. This study proposes a non-thermal plasma (NTP) system for placement in the exhaust system of internal combustion engines to reduce the toxic contaminants (HC, CO, and NOx) of exhaust gases. This NTP system generates a high-voltage discharge that not only responds to the ion chemical reaction to eliminate NOx and CO, but that also generates a combustion reaction at the local high temperature of plasma to reduce HC. The NTP system was designed on both the front and rear of the exhaust pipe to analyze the difference of different exhaust flow rates under the specified frequency. The results indicate that the NTP system can greatly reduce toxic contaminants. The NTP reactor placed in the front of exhaust pipe gave HC and CO removal efficiency of about 34.5% and 16.0%, respectively, while the NTP reactor placed in the rear of exhaust pipe gave NOx removal efficiency of about 41.3%. In addition, the voltage and material directly affect the exhaust gases obviously. In conclusion, the proposed NTP system installed in the exhaust system can significantly reduce air pollutants. These results suggest that applying NTP to the combustion engine should be a useful tool to simultaneously reduce both emissions of NOx and CO.
Highlights
The last few years have witnessed rapid development in industrial technology, with an increasing demand for fuel-based energy
The use of a plasma reactor with a catalyst to treat exhaust gases from gasoline engines was investigated by Dan et al (2005), who observed that particulate matter removal efficiency ranged approximately from 25 to 57% [17]
The spark is generated by the electrode gap of the non-thermal plasma (NTP) reactor. (Tables 3 and 4)
Summary
The last few years have witnessed rapid development in industrial technology, with an increasing demand for fuel-based energy. The exhaust gases emitted into the atmosphere cause air pollution due to the incomplete combustion of carbonaceous fuel. Balki et al (2014) investigated the exhaust emission of an SI engine using gasoline, ethanol, and methanol at different engine speeds and observed that the use of alcohol instead of gasoline as the fuel in a low power engine caused a decline mainly in NOx , hydrocarbons (HC) and CO emissions. Doğan et al (2017) investigated ethanol-gasoline blends as fuel for a four-cylinder and four-stroke spark-ignition engine and found that ethanol added to gasoline in the combustion engine fuel caused a reduction in CO and NOx emission ratios [7]. The use of a plasma reactor with a catalyst to treat exhaust gases from gasoline engines was investigated by Dan et al (2005), who observed that particulate matter removal efficiency ranged approximately from 25 to 57% [17]. The exhaust gas variation of the engine was observed by controlling the position, voltage, and types of NTP reactors with different engine speeds
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