Study on characteristics of particulate emission of diesel aftertreatment with reciprocating flow

In this article, in order to optimize diesel aftertreatment system with periodically reciprocating flow (PRF), an experimental study is conducted to investigate its characteristics such as pollution emissions, regeneration of diesel particulate filter (DPF), concentration and size distribution of particulate matter (PM) escaped as well as temperature distribution under unidirectional flow and PRF operating conditions. The effects of reciprocating flow cycle and exhaust gas flow on the performance of aftertreatment system are investigated in detail. The energy efficiency analysis of the aftertreatment system is also carried out. Experimental results show that (i) as the temperature is lower than the light-off threshold of combustible gas, the aftertreatment system cannot restrain the formation of second particles under the present experiment condition of unidirectional flow; (ii) the aftertreatment system demonstrates excellent performance of trapping particles and filter regeneration as the symmetrical temperature distribution is formed. The PM filter efficiency α_PM is 92% and the specific energy consumption β is 124% for symmetrical temperature distribution; (iii) the increase of reciprocating flow cycle could lead to the shifting of the temperature profiles, this would affect the particle size distribution; (iv) a certain increase of exhaust gas flow from engine would have insignificant change for the temperature distribution; (v) The critical energy efficiency η_c of the system could reach 96.61%.