Thermal Validation Study of AdBlue® Melting for Off Highway Vehicles

Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) is a process where one injects an aqueous solution of urea into a diesel exhaust system in order to reduce NOx emissions. The urea solution known as AdBlue® or Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) is stored in a DEF Tank that can under cold weather conditions freeze over. Since AdBlue® is unusable while frozen, we use heaters installed in the tanks to melt AdBlue® with government regulations mandating time required to melt AdBlue® in the tank.In this article, we investigate whether a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) based methodology can accurately evaluate time required in melting AdBlue® for a given DEF Tank and heater coil design for a production vehicle as per standard testing procedure. Simulations used a coupled methodology with PowerFLOW® as the flow solver and PowerTHERM® as the thermal solver. The flow simulation did require an accurate modelling of phase change from solid to liquid for AdBlue®. We observe excellent agreement between test data and simulation and conclude that we can employ a simulation-based approach to validate and certify DEF Tank design.

Language

  • English

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Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01841783
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Source Agency: SAE International
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 2022-01-0560
  • Files: TRIS, SAE
  • Created Date: Apr 6 2022 2:18PM