comparison of aged and fresh automotive three-way catalyst in driving cycle

Recently, environmental concern and demand for a catalyst’s high performance have increased and many research activities focused on the operation of a three-way catalyst (twc) at the end of its lifetime. catalyst aging is the loss of catalytic activity over time that has crucial importance in the emission of the three-way catalyst. the aim of this paper is, investigating experimentally the performance of a fresh and aged three-way catalytic converter (twc) in the legislative driving cycle. for this, vehicle emission test with fresh and aged catalyst was carried out. in this study, a commercial catalyst was used and was aged in a motor-rig, with sbc cycle (standard bench cycle). the total conversions of hc, co and nox were decreased over the lean-rich cycles in transient conditions. in the real driving condition, almost in the all-time, the engine has a transient condition and in this condition, the non-aged catalyst achieves higher conversion for times with lambda variations.