Thermal management of catalytic converter with heat pipe embedded in thermal energy storage to reduce cold start emissions

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Thermal Energy Storage (TES) System aids in improving the cold start efficiency of the catalytic converter (CC). To further improve the TES and CC performance, loop heat pipes embedded into the PCM, TES unit are presented. For evaluation, three cases are considered: Case 1; CC without TES, Case 2; CC with TES, Case 3; CC with a heat pipe embedded in PCM TES. Mg70Zn24.9Al5.1 is used as PCM and paraffin oil as the working fluid for the heat pipe. Three 30 minute transient cycles with idle events in between were run, with the engine soaking for 30 minutes at ambient conditions with varied loads (0 to 100%) at 2000 rpm. Heat storage and release cycles were run for each load condition. Average warm-up HC, NOx and CO conversion efficiency improvement of 45–85% with Case 3, 35–62% with Case 2 compared to Case 1 were observed. Heat storage time was observed to be lower by ~ 35% for Case 3 while the heat retention time was observed to be better for Case 2 by ~44%. System efficiency and effectiveness were found to be better up to 14% and ~0.2 with Case 3 compared to Case 2. Overall Case 3 showed better performance with some penalty on the heat retention time compared Case 2.