We got your back. But how do we do that for catalytic converters that is the problem. I think Ted was kind of on the right track with his answer, but just as wrong as the rest of the responders. Want to know a secret?
What is a catalytic converter?
Last updated: September 7, B lackened buildings and choking streets—if that’s your experience when you open the front door in the morning, you probably live in a big city like Los Angeles, London, Paris, or Beijing. Cars, buses, and trucks have been a great gift to the world, because they help us move ourselves and the things we need quickly and efficiently. But their engine pollution spoils the places where we live and harms our health. Fortunately, most vehicles are now fitted with pollution-reducing units called catalytic converters sometimes known as «cats» or «cat-cons»which turn the harmful chemicals in vehicle exhausts into harmless gases such as steam. Let’s take a closer look at these brilliant gadgets and how they work! Artwork: The basic concept of a catalytic converter: sitting between your how do people make money off catalytic converters engine and tailpipe, it takes in dirty air and removes a significant amount of pollution from it using chemical catalysts.
How to Recycle Catalytic Converters
I’ve been going around my area removing junk cars outa people’s yards and am listing the converters on ebay, but I wanted to figure out how I can guess about what people will pay in advance. I’d like to know when the auctions end if i’m getting a good amount or not. The age old adage goes, «Something is only worth what somebody else is willing to pay. The price you are seeing on EBay is a pretty decent price, especially if you are selling catalytic convertors. The value in a catalytic convertor lies in its precious metal content. Inside the steel housing is a ceramic «honeycomb» that is coated in specialty alloys and metals. Some catalytic convertors, like aftermarket types, only have a little bit of nickel and as little PM as possible.
Where Recycling makes $ense
Last updated: September 7, B lackened buildings and choking streets—if that’s your experience when you open the front door in the morning, you probably live in a big city like Los Angeles, London, Paris, or Beijing.
Cars, buses, and trucks have been a great gift to the world, because they help us move ourselves and the things we need quickly and efficiently.
But their engine pollution spoils the places where we live and harms our health. Fortunately, most vehicles are now fitted with pollution-reducing units called catalytic converters how do people make money off catalytic converters known as «cats» or «cat-cons»which turn the harmful chemicals in vehicle exhausts into harmless gases such as steam. Let’s take a closer look at these brilliant gadgets and how they work!
Artwork: The basic concept of a catalytic converter: sitting between your car’s engine and tailpipe, it takes in dirty air and removes a significant amount of pollution from it using chemical catalysts. Photo: The columns of the Parthenon in Athens, Greece have been blackened by vehicle pollution.
Athens is one of the world’s most traffic-polluted cities. Photo by courtesy of U. Geological Survey. Car engines run on gasoline or dieselwhich are made from petroleum. Most of our petroleum is formed when the remains of tiny sea creatures rot down, heat up, and get squeezed by layers of sea-bed rocks. Petroleum is made up of hydrocarbons molecules built from carbon and hydrogen atoms because living organisms are mostly made from those atoms. In theory, if you burn any kind of hydrocarbon fuel with oxygen from the air, you release a lot of energy and make nothing but carbon dioxide and waterwhich are clean and relatively harmless.
In practice, though, gasoline is a mixture of about different chemicalsnot just hydrocarbons but additives too, and it doesn’t burn as cleanly as we’d like. That means you generally get some air pollution as a byproduct. The pollutant gases made by car engines include a poisonous gas called carbon monoxideas well as VOCs volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides that cause «smog» the sort of choking, cloudy vehicle pollution we all know and hate.
Pollutant gases are made of harmful molecules, but those molecules are made from relatively harmless atoms. So if we could find a way of splitting up the molecules after they leave a car’s engine and before they get pumped out into the air, we could crack the problem of pollution—or some of it. That’s the job that a catalytic converter does. Photo: An experimental new catalytic converter is tested underneath a car.
These gadgets are much simpler than they sound. A catalyst is simply a chemical that makes a chemical reaction go faster without itself changing in the process.
It’s a bit like an athletics coach who stands by the side of the track and shouts at the runners to go faster. The coach doesn’t run anywhere; he just stands there, waves his arms about, and makes the runners speed up. In a catalytic converter, the catalyst’s job is to speed up the removal of pollution.
The catalyst is made from platinum or a similar, platinum-like metal such as palladium or rhodium. A catalytic converter is a large metal box, bolted to the underside of your car, that has two pipes coming out of it. One of them the converter’s «input» is connected to the engine and brings in hot, polluted fumes from the engine’s cylinders where the fuel burns and produces power. The second pipe the converter’s «output» is connected to the tailpipe exhaust.
As the gases from the engine fumes blow over the catalyst, chemical reactions take place on its surface, breaking apart the pollutant gases and converting them into other gases that are safe enough to blow harmlessly out into the air. One very important thing to note about catalytic converters is that they require you to use unleaded fuelbecause the lead in conventional fuel «poisons» the catalyst and prevents it from taking up the pollutants in exhaust gases. Photo: Engineers are constantly trying to improve the performance of catalytic converters, for example, by developing catalysts that work more effectively at lower temperatures.
This is an example of a low-temperature oxidation catalyst made from tin oxide and platinum. Inside the converter, the gases flow through a dense honeycomb structure made from a ceramic and coated with the catalysts. The honeycomb structure means the gases touch a bigger area of catalyst at once, so they are converted more quickly and efficiently.
In effect, three different chemical reactions are going on at the same time. That’s why we talk about three-way catalytic converters. Some, less-effective converters carry out only the second two oxidation reactions, so they’re called two-way catalytic converters. After the catalyst has done its job, what emerges from the exhaust is mostly nitrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water in the form of steam.
Chart: Effectiveness of catalytic converters. Cats make a big difference to emissions, with three-way converters giving a significant extra benefit over two-way converters. Figures show pollutants in grams per kilometer at 80, kilometers. Chart drawn by Explain that Stuff. Catalytic converters are mainly designed to reduce immediate, local air pollution—dirty air where you’re driving—and this chart certainly seems to suggest that they’re effective. Even so, people sometimes question whether they’re really as green as they.
It’s important to remember that they reduce emissions rather than eliminate them completely. Modern warm up in only 2—3 minutes; even so, significant emissions can still occur during this time. Another issue is whether they increase greenhouse gas emissions.
We think of carbon dioxide as a safe gas, because it’s not toxic in everyday concentrations. Nevertheless, it isn’t entirely harmless, because we now know it’s the major cause of global warming and climate change.
Some people believe catalytic converters make climate change worse because they turn carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide. In fact, the carbon monoxide your car produces would eventually turn into carbon dioxide in the atmosphere all by itself, so a catalytic converter makes no difference on that score: it simply reduces the carbon monoxide a car pumps into the street as it drives along, improving the local air quality.
But when it comes to climate change, auto engineers and environmentalists have long pointed out another serious issue. Although cats turn most nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and oxygen, they also produce small amounts of nitrous oxide N 2 O in the process, a greenhouse gas that’s over times more potent than carbon dioxide.
The trouble is that with so many vehicles on the road, even small amounts of nitrous oxide add up to a major problem. Back inthe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change noted: «The introduction of catalytic converters as a pollution control measure in the majority of industrialized countries is resulting in a substantial increase in N 2 O emissions from gasoline vehicles.
Even so, while catalytic converters have certainly helped us to tackle short-term air pollution, there are concerns that, when it comes to long-term climate change, they could be making matters worse. Before catalytic converters were developed, waste gases made by a car engine blew straight down the exhaust tailpipe and into the atmosphere.
The catalytic converter sits between the engine and the tailpipe, but it doesn’t work like a simple filter: it changes the chemical composition of the exhaust gases by rearranging the atoms from which they’re made:.
Chart: Dirty diesels? Only a tiny proportion of the emissions from a diesel engine about one percent is pollution. That one percent consists mostly of nitrogen oxides about 50 percent and particulates, with relatively small amounts of carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and sulfur dioxide.
Khair and W. Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc. Diesel engines can and do use catalytic converters, but there are several important differences from how they work in gasoline engines. Artwork: Big diesel engines can produce much higher exhaust volumes, so they may need to use multiple catalytic converters «in parallel. Exhaust gas enters at the left 1is evenly separated into streams by a flow distributor unit 2, bluepasses through one of seven separate catalytic converter units 3, redis quietened by a noise muffler system 4, greenand exits, somewhat cleaned up, through the tailpipe 5.
Whom do we thank for making streets and cities safer and cleaner? French chemical engineer Eugene Houdry — patented what seems to have been the very first catalytic converter in the United States, filing the invention on May 5, and receiving his US Patent 2, Catalytic converter for exhaust gases four years later on April 6, Houdry had previously invented catalytic crackingthe industrial process by which the many large complex organic chemicals in petroleum are separated into dozens of useful products, including gasoline.
After that, he experimented with making different kinds of vehicle fuels and making them cleaner. Although he recognized the growing problem of air pollution, his ideas were far ahead of their time: catalytic converters were «poisoned» by the lead additives used in gasoline to improve performance.
Fortunately, in the s, people started to recognize the dangers of lead, a toxic heavy metal. Inthe US Environmental Protection Agency EPA released a report demonstrating how lead harmed people’s health, which began the slow process for removing lead from gasoline. The first practical catalytic converters appeared shortly afterward, in the mids, and have been used in cars ever. Artwork: Eugene Houdry’s original catalytic converter from his patent.
It’s essentially a set of concentric metal tubes blue through which the exhaust gases flow. Clean air is sucked in through ventilation holes yellow with the help of a venturi orange. As in a modern cat, Houdry explains that «the deposited finely divided metal catalyst is preferably platinum,» although other similar metals can be used; unlike a modern cat, the catalyst green isn’t arranged in a honeycomb but mounted in sixteen separate rings red at intervals along the tube, with each one working in parallel.
Houdry invented the basic oxidation catalyst for tackling carbon monoxide. Improved, three-way catalytic converters, which could also tackle nitrogen oxides, were designed in the early s by Carl Keith —John Mooney —and chemical engineers at Engelhard Corporation.
Apart from removing more pollutants, they start to purify the tailpipe gases much faster than earlier converters, so they’re more effective on shorter journeys. Artwork: In Carl Keith and John Mooney’s improved design, there are two separate catalytic converters. Polluted gases flow from the engine red, 10and the exhaust manifold orange, 11through the first catalyst green, 13 and then the second 25some distance away, before exiting through the tailpipe gray, All rights reserved.
Full copyright notice and terms of use. Please rate or give feedback on this page and I will make a donation to WaterAid. Woodford, Chris. Catalytic converters. How a catalytic converter works Before catalytic converters were developed, waste gases made by a car engine blew straight down the exhaust tailpipe and into the atmosphere.
The catalytic converter sits between the engine and the tailpipe, but it doesn’t work like a simple filter: it changes the chemical composition of the exhaust gases by rearranging the atoms from which they’re made: Molecules of polluting gases are pumped from the engine past the honeycomb catalyst, made from platinum, palladium, or rhodium.
The catalyst splits up the molecules into their atoms. The atoms then recombine into molecules of relatively harmless substances such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water, which blow out safely through the exhaust. Do catalytic converters work for diesel engines? Instead of three-way catalysts, diesels use two-way oxidation catalysts which only tackle carbon monoxide and hydrocarbonsand ones specifically designed to work with diesel exhausts, which are significantly cooler than gasoline exhausts.
Since they don’t have reduction catalysts, diesel engines produce much higher tailpipe emissions of nitrogen oxides than gasoline engines. There are various other mechanisms that diesels can use to tackle NOx emissions, but we won’t go into details .
Types of Catalytic Converters for Scrap
Why engines make pollution
But how do we do that for catalytic converters that is the problem. We are sure that many of you have been driving and have seen that black smoke billowing out of a dump truck or tractor trailer on the road and said…yuck! So make sure you read carefully. All Rights Reserved. You can refine or have them refined in other countries if you want to gather up of them and wait 90 days on your money to come back to you. Lack of Resources — Scrap yards that are looking to increase their selling of catalytic converters have a hard time psople the correct information for buying it. When exhaust passes through how do people make money off catalytic converters catalytic convrrters, the precious metals change things like hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide into water and carbon dioxide. Not a bad idea, right? There is 3 acids in the process and peoplle becomes very explosive and at times it does explode. Your green car recycling center can actually pick up your car for you to break down on their own time. The importance of having more than one way to sell a converter will be needed to improve your chances of making money noney catalytic converters.
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