07
Dec
There are millions of cars on the roads of Australia, and each one of them is a potential source of air pollution. Especially in large cities like Melbourne and Sydney, the amount of pollution emitted from the vehicles can create huge environmental problems. Therefore, in order to resolve them, states, cities and governments have established clean-air laws to restrict the amount of pollution a vehicle can emit. And over the years, car manufacturers have made quite a few refinements to fuel systems and car engines in accordance to these laws.
One of these changes is the catalytic converter. The catalytic converter was designed by a French engineer in 1975 – Eugene Houdry, after he moved to the US and was concerned about the role of automobile exhaust and smoke stack exhaust had in air pollution. Not long after, the catalytic converter was invented and the pollution problems were more or less solved.
Car engines run on diesel or gasoline, both of which are made from petroleum. Most of the petroleum on Earth is formed when the remains of tiny sea creatures rot, heat up and get squeezed by layers of sea-bed rocks. Petroleum is comprised of hydrocarbons due to the fact that most living organisms are made from these molecules as well.
Theoretically speaking, if you burn hydrocarbon fuel with oxygen from the air, a lot of energy will be released which will be made just from water and carbon dioxide, which are relatively harmless and clean. However, in practice, there might be a little bit too much or too little oxygen, or there may be impurities in the fuel you’re burning or in the engine. This means that you’ll generally be producing air pollution as a result. The pollutant gases created by car engines include poisonous gasses called carbon monoxide, as well as volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides that cause smog.
Inside a converter, the gases flow through a dense honeycomb ceramic made structure coated with the catalysts. The honeycomb structure makes the gases touch a bigger area of a catalyst so they are converted more efficiently and quickly. Furthermore, three chemical reactions are happening at the same time within the converter. For this reason, you’re likely to come across three-way converters on the market and these are the recommended ones for use in modern times. After the catalyst has completed its job, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, water and oxygen emerge from the exhaust.
