Digital Materials Methods for DPF Development

Diesel Particulate Filter (DPF) material design based on a traditional design of experiments approach can be very time consuming and costly, due to the high number of tests and prototype material samples required. This provides an opportunity for the application of simulation tools at the microscopic scale, which are recently seeing increasing use in DPF material studies. The current work describes a framework for such micro-scale simulations based on high fidelity digital representations of the porous materials of interest, on the rationale that the performance of the latter materials depends strongly on the coupling of different physicochemical phenomena occurring at the microscopic scale where material morphology is important. The state-of-the-art methods presented are formulated to circumvent assumptions inherent in simplified macroscopic treatment of porous materials in order to provide an accurate but computationally tractable DPF material design tool for the needs of industrial users.