Numerical investigation on the urea melting characteristics with coolant and electric heaters

A Urea-SCR(Selective Catalytic Reactor) system, which converts nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water in the presence of a reducing agent, creates a major exhaust gas aftertreatment system for NOx reduction among other compounds. With regard to vehicle applications, a urea solution was chosen based on its eutectic composition of a 32.5 wt% urea-water solution. An important advantage of this eutectic composition is that its melting point of -11.7°C is sufficiently low to avoid solidification in cold environments. However, the storage tanks must be heated separately in case of low ambient temperature levels to ensure a sufficient amount of liquid is available during scheduled start ups. In this study, therefore, a numerical investigation of three-dimensional unsteady heating problems analyzed to understand the melting processes and heat transfer characteristics including liquid volume fraction, temperature distributions, and temperature profiles. The investigations were performed using Fluent 6.3 commercial software that modeled coolant and electric heater models based on a urea solution. It is shown that the melting performance with the electric heater is higher than a coolant heater and is more efficient.