Study And Development Of The Three-way Catalytic Converter And Mat Evaluation Test Systems

As a part of backbone in national economy, automobile industry produces traffic jam problem, noise pollution and air pollution when it contributes immensely to human development. The demand for improvement in purification of vehicle exhaust gases as well as improved fuel consumption is getting stricter in recent years from the standpoint of global environmental protection. China government takes many technology measures and control strategies to reduce automobile emissions. As Stage II emission standard has been put into effect by State Environmental Protection Administration of China in July 1st, 2003 and Stage III will carry out in July 1st, 2007, the emission standards will get more stringent.Three-way catalytic converter plays a very important role in automobile emission control. After going through the three-way catalytic converter, toxic emission gas can become nontoxic gas, such as CO2, N₂ and H₂O. The ceramic mat, which is a very important part of three-way catalytic converter assembly, holds the ceramic carrier and shocks absorption between the stainless steel can and the ceramic carrier. The quality of the ceramic mats determines the working state of the three-way catalytic converters directly, and affects the emission control capability of the automobiles.In this paper, the capability and the evaluation tests of the three-way catalytic converter are introduced and researched. In the research of the ceramic mat's components, it is found that vermiculite is the most important part for the ceramic mat, which determines the thermal expansibility characteristic and the thermal thickness characteristic of the ceramic mat. And, in this paper, a thermal expansibility characteristic test system, a thermal thickness change test system and a real-time weight evaluation test system are researched and developed. Project choice, software and hardware design, test process and results analysis are wrote in details respectively in the research and development of the above test systems. At last, a few other test systems are researched and developed, which include the vibration test, the double-quick cooling test system and an axes force test system based on national standard and the other test systems based on the domestic and foreign literatures.For the practical producing process of the ceramic mats, developing new type mats and evaluating the quality of mats can be realized by the test systems which areresearched and developed in this paper. Thus, the competition ability of the corporations which produce the ceramic mats can be promoted enormously.