CFD Simulation of Soot Filtration in Diesel Particulate Filters

Soot emissions from automotive applications can be reduced through on-board diesel particulate filters (DPFs): the filter gets progressively loaded by filtering the soot laden flue gases, thus causing an increasing pressure drop, until an oxidative regeneration is induced by temperature rise. Due to the complexity of the involved phenomena, a fully predictive and detailed mathematical model represents a very useful tool that could be profitably used during trap design and in the engineering of the regeneration phase. In particular, a detailed analysis of the filtration efficiency with respect to particle size and filter through-wall velocity was performed via the estimation of the different particle collection mechanisms. The EulerianEulerian multi-phase approach was employed in this work due to its flexibility and low computational costs, especially when compared to Eulerian-Lagrangian models.