SCR Deactivation Study for OBD Applications

Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) catalysts will be used to reduce oxides of nitrogen (NO_x) emissions from internal combustion engines in a number of applications. Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI)® performed an Internal Research & Development project to study SCR catalyst thermal deactivation. The study included a V/W/TiO₂ formulation, a Cu-zeolite formulation and an Fe-zeolite formulation. This work describes NO_x timed response to ammonia (NH₃) transients as a function of thermal aging time and temperature. It has been proposed that the response time of NO_x emissions to NH₃ transients, effected by changes in diesel emissions fluid (DEF) injection rate, could be used as an on-board diagnostic (OBD) metric. The objective of this study was to evaluate the feasibility and practicality of this OBD approach. While these experiments showed a noticeable trend with aging, there were also observations and considerations that suggest this approach may be reasonable as a catalyst-aging evaluation test method, but impractical for OBD purposes.