3-way catalytic converter for fume treatment

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voeckel

Active member
Joined
Sep 30, 2012
Messages
38
Hi forum,

I am still busy abroad so little time to contribute or at least to show up.

I thought about fume reatment and suddenly, a thought came up. Has someone ever used a 3-way car catalytic converter to break down the NOx gasses? It is so common in the car industry but - correct me if I´m wrong - I think this is a new thought here! Wanted to share that thought quickly here.

Oxides of Nitrogen (NOx) are broken down by those converters to CO2, Nitrogen (N2), and water (H2O). So why not simply running the hood exhaust additionally through such a catalytic converter after the wet scrubber to be on the safe side regarding NOx? :idea: Other fumes should be already neutralized in earlier stages and any leftovers of NOx still there in case the wet scrubber leaves some would be taken care of...

Regards,
Peter

Edited to be more precise.
 
Yes I though about it and we discussed in in one recent thread on how to knock down Nox. But I know too little about the mechanism of catalytic converters to say wheter that could work or not. The only thing I saw that spoke against it, was that the lamda sensor that regulates it requires a very tightly defined air(or oxygen) to Nox relation to work.
But hey - if anyone has got some old cats lying around, it would´t hurt just to plug them on and see what happens!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalytic_converter
 
There are industrial catalytic converters that are used to scrub NOx, and far more. They are not inexpensive to purchase, let alone the permuting with the EPA, the ducting, the suction fan, etc etc etc.

A regular car catalytic converter is not going to work for the types of acid digestions we do when refining.

You would serve your purposes far better with a simple enclosed reaction connected to a simple, inexpensive wet scrubbing system.

I picked up this wet scrubber from a university. It's a one off, no patents, and made for acid digestion. When I get the chance I'm going to spec it out and make the plans available. It's a fairly compact unit, the only part that is not included is a nitrogen generator.

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This is a picture of a catalytic fume scrubber, this one I purchased from Jonn on this forum. This will scrub all the air in my building, as well as the exhaust from the wet fume scrubber. But like I said it's not inexpensive to operate, install, permit, etc.

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Both will scrub NOx, but the price differences between the two are worlds apart. You can build the wet fume scrubber for right around $5,000 but the catalytic fume scrubber, new, is far more expensive.

Scott
 
As far as I know, common car cats will work only if at operating temperatures. So we're talking about 700F or more. Also, there is no HCl vapour in exhaust system. This would be very detrimental to metalic cats.
 
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