Japanese car maker Honda has a lot of great ideas and concept vehicles for their line up of environmental cars that it presented during the recently concluded Frankfurt Motor Show. Honda’s ‘Environment’ area focuses on the automaker’s revolutionary environmental technology employed by Honda which will be present on its Small Hybrid Sports Concept, its next generation clean diesel engine i-DTEC, Honda Civic Hybrid, and the fuel cell technology incorporated in its Honda FCX Concept.

Honda’s next generation clean diesel engine is continually being developed. It makes use of a world-first technology which aims to decrease diesel emissions so that they could be equal to the emission level of petrol engines.

The first goal of the development program of the diesel engine is to reach the Euro 5 requirements and Honda is proud to report that its 2.2-liter i-DTEC engine has already reached beyond the Euro 5 requirements. This new engine will soon be available as car enthusiast will be seeing it in the models of next year’s Accord range. Though the engine complies with the Euro 5 requirements, performance has not been compromised. It continues to have incredible power and torque, both of these were even increased together with the improvement of its fuel economy.

However, Honda does not want to stop with the achievement of the Euro 5 requirements as it aims to meet US Tier II/Bin 5 requirements as well. To attain this, its second phase of development for the said diesel engine includes an innovative catalytic converter. What’s innovative about this catalytic converter is that it makes use of the reductive reaction of ammonia to ‘detoxify’ the nitrogen oxide (NOx) by converting it into non-toxic nitrogen. But it does not make use of the Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) systems which employs urea injection that stored in the storage tank; instead, it uses ammonia that’s produced directly within the catalytic converter.

A report from the Auto Spectator explains the innovative catalytic converter that Honda has. It features a two-layer structure. The first layer takes in the nitrogen oxides from the exhaust gas. This then reacts with the hydrogen taken from the exhaust gases to produce ammonia during the periodic rich-burn controlled by the engine management system. The latter will then be absorbed by the second layer. The ammonia produced by the reaction of the hydrogen and the nitrogen oxide is then used to convert the remaining nitrogen oxide residing in the exhaust. Ammonia is the perfect tool for this since it is a highly-reactive reagent for converting the nitrogen oxide into just nitrogen in oxygen-rich and lean-burn atmosphere. This system also makes way for an improved nitrogen oxide reduction efficiency even in the most serious temperature range of 200-300°C for the exhaust gas systems of diesel engines.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 2:52 am and is filed under Catalytic Converter Makes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.