ULSD and B20 hydrocarbon impacts on EGR cooler performance and degradation

Exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) cooler fouling has emerged as an important issue in diesel engine development. Uncertainty about the level of impact that fuel chemistry may have upon this issue has resulted in a need to investigate the cooler fouling process with emerging non-traditional fuel sources to gage their impact on the process. This study reports experiments using both ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) and 20% biodiesel (B20) at elevated exhaust hydrocarbon conditions to investigate the EGR cooler fouling process. The results show that there is little difference between the degradation in cooler effectiveness for ULSD and B20 at identical conditions. At lower coolant temperatures, B20 exhibits elevated organic fractions in the deposits compared with ULSD, but this does not appear to lead to incremental performance degradation under the conditions studied. Comparisons with a previous study conducted at low HC levels shows that the presence of increased volatiles in the deposit does not impact the degradation in effectiveness significantly. Moreover, the effectiveness loss divided by the deposit mass gain for both low- and high-HC conditions seems to indicate that the HC fraction in the deposit does not significantly alter the overall thermal properties of the deposit layer.