Modeling of Sintered Metal Fiber Diesel Particulate Filter Wall Permeability Based on 3D Digital Structure From CT-Scan

Sintered metal fiber (SMF) diesel particulate filters (DPF) systems efficiently remove particulate matter (PM) emission from diesel engine exhaust with low flow resistance. The permeability of DPF filtration media is the key property determining DPF fuel penalty to the engine. To advance the understanding and optimization of SMF filtration media, a general model to compute SMF media permeability based on 3D digital structure from computed tomography scan (CT-Scan) is developed in this study. An open source computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool, OpenFOAM, is used to calculate the SMF porous media permeability. The media samples computation domain is approximately 0.9mmx0.9mmx1.8mm (depth) and one hour is needed for each simulation with 8–9 million mesh cells. The study reveals variations of permeability among different SMF media samples. The computed permeability from the 3D simulation has a good agreement with experiment data and achieves a much better accuracy than previous analytical models. In addition, through this study, a significant amount of in-depth information of flow field across the porous media is obtained, which is beneficial to improve the understanding of DPF fibrous media and builds the foundation for more advanced filtration model development.