CFD-simulations of urea-waterspray in an after-treatment systemusing Star-CCM+

Abstract: The legislation has forced the vehicle industry to reduce tail-end emissions. The air pollutant nitrogen oxide (NOX) has been shown to have a negative impact on human health and the environment. One of the key technologies to reduce the levels of NOX emitted from a vehicle is by implementing an after-treatment system. The after-treatment system includes catalysts, a particle filter and an evaporation system. In the evaporation system a liquid jet containing a urea-water solution known as AdBlue is injected into the hot exhaust gases to evaporate into gaseous ammonia NH3 and water H2O. Then NH3 enters the Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) catalyst where it chemically reacts with NOX to form N2 and H2O. Problems can arise if an excessive amount of AdBlue is injected and a fluid film is formed on evaporation surfaces. At certain operating conditions the fluid film can crystallise and form solid deposits. The solid deposits can cause high back-pressure, material deterioration and ammonia slip. This project is done in collaboration with Scania CV AB. Scania is a world-leading manufacturer of heavy-duty vehicles, busses and engines. Scania works continuously to develop new simulation methods to capture the complex phenomena of AdBlue spray, wall film dynamics and risk of solid deposits, to use in the development process of new components. The aim of this project is to implement and evaluate a new method to predict the risk of crystallisation of urea (AdBlue) using the software Star-CCM+. Two different geometries are studied, a test rig and a Scania silencer. Different operating conditions, parameter settings and a speed-up method are analysed. During the project a base-line model has been created and the results have been compared with measurement results and the software AVL Fire. The results on the test rig show the effect of altering the mesh and important model parameters. Injected particles are grouped into parcels with the same properties. The number of parcels is a crucial factor for the wall film formation and should be sufficiently high to get a statistical representation of the droplet size distribution. The results from the real silencer show strong evaporation and thin wall film formation with the suggested method. The method is shown to be stable and the software is user-friendly. A speed-up method was investigated to decrease the computational time. The computational time was reduced by a factor 20. The outcome of this project is a guide for set-up of AdBlue spray and wall film simulations. Recommendations to future work includes further validation of the settings, investigation of the evaporation rate and droplet size distribution and the application to other cases. The next step is also to tune the critical thresholds for deposit risk assessment.