Regeneration Characteristics of Diesel Particulate Filters Under Transient Exhaust Conditions

Particulate emissions from diesel engines, which have hazardous effects on living beings and environment, can be controlled by employing diesel particulate filters (DPFs). The DPF cleans the exhaust by physical trapping of the particulates. A major challenge in developing a DPF with wider applications is its lower durability. The filter durability may be increased by careful design of regeneration (soot oxidation) strategies. The regeneration characteristics of a DPF under steady state conditions are well known. However, during a typical driving cycle, a DPF is subjected to highly transient conditions due to changes in driving modes. These transients result in fluctuations of exhaust flow rate, gas composition and temperature. Such modulating exhaust conditions make the DPF performance and regeneration characteristics differ significantly from that under steady state conditions. The objective of this paper is to investigate the thermal and catalytic regeneration characteristics of DPF under transient exhaust conditions. In this work, a computational investigation is conducted to determine the effect of temperature and exhaust flow modulations on a DPF. The paper contributes to a better fundamental understanding of the filter’s performance under transient driving conditions.