Investigation of cross-stream spray injection and wall impingement in a circular channel for SCR application

Abstract

A parametric study of cross-stream pulsed spray injection and wall impingement characteristics in a circular channel has been carried out with an objective to investigate performance improvement in selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems for exhaust gas after-treatment in diesel engines. The spray computations are performed based on a combined Eulerian and Lagrangian based modeling approach for the continuous and the discrete phases respectively. The simulation results are validated using the in-house experimental data for water injection in both open atmospheric and channel flow conditions. The spray structure, penetration, and droplet size are compared and good agreement between the experiments and simulations is demonstrated. Though the focus of the present work is on studying the influence of liquid preheating on post-impingement spray and wall-film characteristics as well as evolution of species mass fraction, the effect of air mass flow rates, and temperature, and the choice of the working liquid (water or Urea Water Solution (UWS)) are also investigated. While the mass flow rate of air and the selection of the above liquids for spray injection are found to have marginal influence on the results, the liquid preheating is shown to strongly affect the droplet evaporation and thus, the spray impact process. Especially, the liquid injection temperature that leads to flash evaporation results in reduced wall filming, higher ammonia generation rate and spatial uniformity of NH 3 across the channel. This paper demonstrates preheating as a promising approach for the improvement of SCR performance. • Spray injection and wall impingement in a duct air flow relevant to SCR systems is numerically investigated. • The predicted post-impingement droplet size and spatial distribution compared well against the in-house experiments. • Marginal influence of air mass flow rate and choice of the liquid (water or UWS) is observed. • Preheating the injected liquid is a viable alternate for performance optimization of the SCR systems. • Especially, the flash evaporation condition ensures reduced wall filming and, higher rate of NH 3 and its spatial uniformity.