Volume 29, Issue 1

An increasing environmental concern for diesel particulate emissions has led to the development of efficient and robust diesel particulate filters (DPF). Although the main function of a DPF is to filter solid particles, the beneficial effects of applying catalytic coatings in the filter walls have been recognized. The catalyzed DPF technology is a unique type of chemical reactor in which a multitude of physicochemical processes simultaneously take place, thus complicating the tasks of design and optimization. To this end, modeling has contributed considerably in reducing the development effort by offering a better understanding of the underlying phenomena and reducing the excessive experimental efforts associated with experimental testing. A comprehensive review of the evolution and the most recent developments in DPF modeling, covering phenomena such as transport, fluid mechanics, filtration, catalysis, and thermal stresses, is presented in this article. A thorough presentation on the mathematical model formulation is given based on literature references and the differences between modeling approaches are discussed. Selected examples of model application and validation versus the experimental data are presented.