Effect analysis on the hydrocarbon adsorption performance enhancement of the different zeolite molecular sieves in the gasoline engine under the cold start process

Abstract

In this work, the adsorption performance of ZSM-5, Beta-A, and NON zeolites on hydrocarbons emitted from the engine is investigated for selecting the best suited zeolite molecular sieves for hydrocarbon traps during the cold-start phase of the engine. Based on the giant canonical Monte Carlo (MC) method for adsorption simulation, the single-component, multi-component maximum adsorption, adsorption isotherms, adsorption sites of different hydrocarbon molecules on ZSM-5, Beta-A, and NON molecular sieves were investigated by using C2H2, C2H4, C3H6, and C7H8 molecules as probe molecules. The single-component adsorption results showed that for the macromolecular hydrocarbon toluene (C7H8) Beta-A zeolite had the best adsorption effect, followed by ZSM-5 zeolite, and NON had the worst adsorption effect. The adsorption of propylene (C3H6) on ZSM-5 and Beta-A is close to each other, and the adsorption of ethylene (C2H4) and acetylene (C2H2) are much different relative to C3H6 and C7H8. This is due to the fact that the adsorption properties of zeolites are determined by the molecular diameter of the hydrocarbons. The results of multicomponent adsorption showed that the adsorption amounts of multicomponent competitive adsorption were reduced relative to single-component adsorption, but were affected by other components in different ways, from small to large C7H8<C3H6<C2H4<C2H2.