Numerical Modeling of an Automotive Catalyst for CO and NO Emissions

Catalytic combustion is useful to avoid emission of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides into the environment. The widespread use of the catalytic converter was the response of the automotive industry to the legislation of the countries which sets limits on pollutant emissions. The catalytic combustion of CO + NO and air mixtures in a planar stagnation-point flow over a platinum foil is studied numerically in this paper. In order to optimize the operation of the platinum converter, chemical kinetic knowledge is necessary, therefore a kinetic model is proposed, based on elementary reaction steps, that allows to describe the experiments quantitatively. The heterogeneous reaction mechanism is modeled with the dissociative adsorption of the molecular oxygen and the nondissociative adsorption of CO, together with a surface reaction of the Langmiur-Hinshelwood type and the desorption reaction of the adsorbed products, CO(s) and NO(s). The resulting governing equations based on the boundary layer theory have been numerically integrated by using Runge-Kutta method and the response curve has been obtained as a function of the initial mixture concentration. The reduction of NO and oxidation of CO in absence and presence of O₂ has been investigated, and the optimal oxygen feeding into the initial mixture concentration for the maximum reduction of CO and NO was found and corresponds to the reported experimental results.