Modeling of the Injection and Decomposition Processes of Urea-Water-Solution Spray in Automotive SCR Systems

The current work aims to develop a reliable numerical model simulating the depletion and decomposition process of urea-water solution (UWS) droplets injected in a hot exhaust stream as experienced in an automotive urea-based selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system. The depleting process of individual UWS droplets in heated environment is simulated using a multicomponent vaporization model with separate depletion law for each component. While water depletion is modeled as a vaporization process, urea depletion from the UWS droplet is modeled using two different approaches. The first approach models urea depletion as a vaporization process with an experimentally determined saturation pressure. The second approach models urea depletion as a direct thermolysis process from molten urea to ammonia and isocyanic acid using various sets of kinetic parameters. Comparison with experimental data shows the superiority of modeling urea depletion as a vaporization process. The developed multicomponent vaporization model is implemented into a computational fluid dynamics code to simulate the injection of UWS spray and its interaction with the hot exhaust gas inside a typical exhaust pipe. While the exhaust gas is treated using the Eulerian frame of reference, the injected UWS droplets are tracked in the Lagrangian frame. Ammonia production from the evaporated urea is modeled using two-steps finite rate chemical reactions involving urea thermolysis and hydrolysis of isocyanic acid. The influence of operating conditions on ammonia generation from a UWS spray is investigated.