Simulation on the optimum shape and location of urea injector for urea-SCR system of heavy-duty diesel engine to prevent NH3 slip

Abstract

In the past few years, considerable efforts have been directed towards the further development of Urea-SCR(selective catalytic reduction) technique for diesel-driven vehicle. Although urea possesses considerable advantages over Ammonia(NH3) in terms of toxicity and handling, its necessary decomposition into Ammonia and carbon dioxide complicates the DeNOx process. Moreover, a mobile SCR system has only a short distance between engine exhaust and the catalyst entrance. Hence, this leads to not enough residence times of urea, and therefore evaporation and thermolysis can not be completed at the catalyst entrance. This may cause high secondary emissions of Ammonia and isocyanic acid from the reducing agent and also leads to the fact that a considerable section of the catalyst may be misused for the purely thermal steps of water evaporation and thermolysis of urea. Hence the key factor to implementation of SCR technology on automobile is fast thermolysis, good mixing of Ammonia and gas, and reducing Ammonia slip. In this context, this study performs three-dimensional numerical simulation of urea injection of heavy-duty diesel engine under various injection pressure, injector locations and number of injector hole. This study employs Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to consider break-up, evaporation and heat and mass-transfer between droplet and exhaust gas with considering thermolysis and the turbulence dispersion effect of droplet. The SCR-monolith brick has been treated as porous medium. The effect of location and number of hole of urea injector on the uniformity of Ammonia concentration distribution and the amount of water at the entrance of SCR-monolith has been examined in detail under various injection pressures. The present results show useful guidelines for the optimum design of urea injector for reducing Ammonia slip and improving DeNOx performance. Copyright © 2005 SAE International.