Development of Advanced Three-Way Catalyst Technology

Environmental problems have raised much attention recently. Automotive manufacturers are strongly required to suppress tailpipe emission world wide. To meet tight legislations such as PZEV and EU5 which are stringent regulation, it is well known that improving the quick light-off performance and hot-NOx conversion are critical issues with limited precious group metals (PGM) usage. Due to the strong pressure of recent PGM prices, further PGM reduction is strongly required for tight regulation applications. Moreover, there is a requirement of utilizing lower cell density substrates to decrease catalyst backpressure for the improvement of vehicle drivability. This paper will present a newly designed formulation that has excellent quick light-off and NOx reduction performance. In the developed catalyst, new thermally stable OSC material and porous washcoat technologies were adopted. Also, the washcoat loading of the catalyst was lowered against current formulations. The developed catalyst system exhibited superior performance to the previous generation system on bench and vehicle evaluation.