Development of quantitative measuring technique to find critical flow conditions for preventing soot deposit accumulated in the diesel exhaust system using main muffler composed of three chambers

Abstract

If a vehicle that meets emission regulations operates sufficiently for a long time under low speed and low load conditions, soot contained in the exhaust gas is accumulated on the inner surface of the exhaust system. This soot deposition problem occurs frequently in all diesel cars. However, when a vehicle is placed under the conditions of sudden start and sudden acceleration after city mode driving for a long time, the deposited soot is abruptly blown up with the soot produced during fuel combustion. In the present study, the main cause of the abrupt outburst of deposited soot is investigated to overcome this adverse phenomenon. First, we developed a method to quantify the amount of the exhausted soot particles (or the accumulated soot particles) by measuring the opacity that represents the contamination level of the exhaust gas due to soot particles. Using this measuring scheme for deposited soot, we found the critical conditions for engine speeds and load conditions at which soot particles are emitted into the air without accumulation in the exhaust system using main muffler composed of three chambers. In order to meet these critical conditions and thus to drastically reduce soot accumulation, the exhaust system using the main muffler applied in this study must be designed to ensure that the flow velocity of the exhaust gas is higher than 62 m/s when the back pressure at the exit of the turbocharger is under 0.08 bars.