An Experimental Investigation of the Oxidation Characteristics of Diesel Particulate Matter

Most diesel engines require diesel particulate filter (DPF) systems to meet increasingly stringent emissions regulations. To develop an effective thermal management system for preventing the failure of a DPF system caused by the thermal runaway, it is important to investigate the heat release characteristics and the oxidation behavior of PM for designing optimum DPF regeneration algorithms. The experiment result revealed that the amounts of heat released from the oxidation of SOF-containing diesel PM sample, dry diesel soot, and surrogate soot were approximately 14.67 kJ/g, 17.3 kJ/g, and 14.02 kJ/g. Results also indicated significant differences in the temporal rates of heat release in the oxidation of SOF-containing diesel PM, dry diesel soot and surrogate soot. The oxidation rate of surrogate soot decreased monotonically, while that of diesel soot was two distinct zones. The oxidation behavior of surrogate soot was found to be independent of the heat treatment schemes, while that of diesel soot was strongly influenced by them. Furthermore, the PM oxidation was weakly influenced by the volatile components of SOF, whereas it was noticeably affected by thermal aging. The global kinetic parameters were determined for the diesel PM and surrogate soot samples. Finally, a model for predicting heat release rate was developed with the experimental data.