A new streamer discharge chamber for nox removal from heavy vehicles: a simulation study

Abstract

The problem of air pollution caused by the production of nitrogen Oxides (NOx) from diesel engine vehicle at this time is one of the contributor factor in human health problems and environmental. Currently, there are many methods being used to reduce and treat NOx including selective catalytic reduction (SCR), NOx storage and reduction (NSR), exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and electron beam irradiation. However, each method has its own limitations in removing the NOx from diesel engine exhaust. Non-thermal plasma (pulsed streamer discharge) was recognized as discharge of a potential technology for the removal of pollutants from diesel engine exhaust. Initial research finding shows that the use of Non-thermal Plasma equilibrium is a promising technique in controlling and removing the NOx from diesel engine vehicles. In this study, a new exhaust system that is a parallel cascaded chamber incorporating with Non-thermal plasma (pulse streamer discharge) was successfully designed and simulated. The use of parallel shape is to prevent any back pressure inside the chamber and the cascaded plasma chamber is chosen in order to repetitively remove and optimized the removal of NOx from exhaust chamber. A Simulation study have been carried out using Commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) to assess the performance o f the plasma Chamber design against the removal of NOx from diesel engine exhaust. Several parameters including gap distance, length of the chamber and the number of cascaded were accounted to study the effects of the parameters to the overall system performance. The simulation result indicates that a gap distance o f 4-5 mm, chamber length of 190mm and three cascaded chamber have found to provide an optimum design of pulsed streamer discharge chamber for NOx removal.