CFD Investigation of the Flow Characteristics of an Automotive Catalyst Monolith

Abstract

The boundary layer development inside the automotive catalyst monoliths has a significant effect on their pressure losses. Typically, the monolith is made of ceramic, comprises of several thousand channels of small hydraulic diameter. This paper investigated the pressure drop of the single channel and to predict the boundary layer development along the monolith single channel using the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. The modelling of the flow through the monolith single channel using CFD was represented with a single channel to reduce computational effort. The monolith single channel was using the k-epsilon from the turbulence model to predict the pressure drop using CFD simulation. The result of the CFD prediction of pressure drop data was compared with the measurement and formulation data while the development of boundary layer was observed along the monolith channel. The outcome of this paper are shows that the CFD prediction of pressure drop along the monolith channel corresponds to the measurement and formulation data. For the development of boundary layer along the monolith channel was observed that the higher the Re number the higher the hydrodynamic entry length.