Felipe Féres Ferreira

Abstract

Nowadays, two topics about vehicles that have been discussed a lot are the use of biofuels and the air pollution. In the specific context of vehicles with diesel engines, the biodiesel demand has been increasing, which brings a lot of environmental benefits. However, even though biodiesel causes less air pollution than traditional diesel, it still pollutes the air in a way that is not accepted by the current laws. Then, a device called Diesel Particulate Filter, or just DPF, is used to mitigate this problem. In this work, it is aimed to describe the multiphase flow, constituted by air and particles generated by biodiesel combustion, inside this device. Then, it is presented a methodology able to numerically simulate this type of flow. This methodology has used an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach to describe the multiphase flow and it also has used the Forchheimer equation to model the flow inside a porous region that exists inside the DPF. The equations that describe the air flow are numerically solved by using the Finite Element Method while the particulates’ motion equations are solved by the 4th order Runge-Kutta method. A computational code based on this methodology was developed and a verification process was made on it before it was used to simulate this problem. After that, the code was used to simulate the flow in the DPF and the results were compared with the ones found in the literature, making it possible to verify that the presented methodology is really capable to simulate correctly the airflow with biodiesel particulates inside a DPF

Advising

Advisor: Anjos, G. R.