Vol. 11, No.1, pp.18-25 (2017)
NOx Removal From Diesel Engine Exhaust Using Low Voltage DC Powered High Voltage Power Supply
S. Mohapatro1 and A. Bhattacharya2
1School of Electrical Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Bhubaneswar, India
2Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science Bangalore, India
Abstract
In the recent year pollution level has increased due to ever increase in both stationary and automobile diesel engine exhaust. The most harmful pollutant coming out of diesel engine exhaust, NOx need to be controlled due to the recent stringent emission standard. In the recent study, the electric discharge based NOx treatment has gained popularity for both stationary and automobile exhaust cleaning. But controlling the NOx from automobile diesel exhaust using electric discharge has a major concern about the high voltage power supply availability in a vehicle. Thus there is a need of high voltage power supply excited by low voltage DC. This paper describes a low voltage DC powered high voltage power supply. The power supply was fabricated, aiming to retrofit to a vehicle for exhaust treatment. This power supply is tested for the removal of NOx from filtered real exhaust. The filtered exhaust from a 5 kVA diesel engine was treated using both wire and pipe cylindrical plasma reactor. To enhance the NOx removal efficiency MS13x was used as adsorbent in cascade with the plasma reactor. With the use of low voltage DC powered high voltage power supply appreciable amount of NOx was removed. The above experiments were conducted at the laboratory level.
Keywords - Electric discharge, non-thermal plasma, filtered exhaust, NOx removal, flyback