Modeling Water Condensation in Exhaust A/T Devices

Ignoring the impact of water condensation leads to incorrect temperature simulation during cold start, and this can lead to questions being raised about the overall accuracy of aftertreatment simulation tools for both temperature and emission predictions. This report provides a mathematical model to simulate the condensation and evaporation of water in exhaust after-treatment devices. The simulation results are compared with experimental data. Simulation results show that the temperature profiles obtained using the condensation model are more accurate than the profiles obtained without using the condensation model. The model will be very useful in addressing questions that concern the accuracy of the simulation tool during cold-start and heating up of catalysts, which accounts for the conditions where tailpipe emission issues are most significant. Because the changes to the model affect temperature prediction before catalyst light-off, there is not a major impact on the emission performance prediction of the new model. However, the temperature predictions are greatly improved which leads to overall higher confidence in all of the model predictions.