Warm-up strategy for a Diesel Oxidation Catalyst

This paper proposes a warm-up strategy for a Diesel Oxidation Catalyst (DOC) which is grounded on a simple distributed parameter model. This first principles model of the propagation of the temperature variations accounts for spatially distributed heat generation (due to chemical reactions). We show that heat generation can be regarded as inlet temperature variations. This fact is supported by experimental results. As a consequence, a simple warm-up strategy can be developed. It allows to decrease the DOC response time using pulse input signals. The parameters of the proposed warm-up strategy are exhaustively studied. We show that, to achieve good performance, the strategy need not include more than two pulses and that the pulse magnitude need not be greater than three times the desired final magnitude.