3D Numerical Simulations of Selective Catalytic Reduction of NOx With Detailed Surface Chemistry

Environmental regulations have put stringent requirements on NOx emissions in the transportation industry, essentially requiring the use of exhaust after-treatment on diesel fueled light and heavy-duty vehicles. Urea-Water-Solution (UWS) based Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) for NOx is one the most widely adopted methods for achieving these NOx emissions requirements. Improved understanding and optimization of SCR after-treatment systems is therefore vital, and numerical investigations can be employed to facilitate this process. For this purpose, detailed and numerically accurate models are desired for in-cylinder combustion and exhaust after-treatment. The present paper reports on 3-D numerical modeling of the Urea-Water-Solution SCR system using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The entire process of Urea injection, evaporation, NH3 formation and NOx reduction is numerically investigated. The simulation makes use of a detailed kinetic surface chemistry mechanism to describe the catalytic reactions. A multi-component spray model is applied to account for the urea evaporation and decomposition process. The CFD approach also employs an automatic meshing technique using Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) to refine the mesh in regions of high gradients. The detailed surface chemistry NOx reduction mechanism validated by Olsson et al. (2008) is applied in the SCR region. The simulations are run using both transient and steady-state CFD solvers. While transient simulations are necessary to reveal sufficient details to simulate catalytic oxidation during transient engine processes or under cyclic variations, the steady-state solver offers fast and accurate emission solutions. The simulation results are compared to available experimental data, and good agreement between experimental data and model results is observed.