08/05/2024, 12:23 How do catalytic converters work?

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Catalytic converters

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: February 18, 2022.

Blackened 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 car's engine and tailpipe, it takes in dirty air and removes a significant
amount of pollution from it using chemical catalysts.

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Contents
1. Why engines make pollution
2. What is a catalytic converter?
3. What happens inside the converter?
4. How effective are catalytic converters?
5. How a catalytic converter works
6. Do catalytic converters work for diesel engines?
7. Who invented the catalytic converter?
8. Find out more

Why engines make pollution

Car engines run on gasoline or diesel, which 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 too.

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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 water, which are clean and relatively harmless. In practice, though, gasoline is a mixture of about 150 different chemicals, not 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 monoxide, as well as VOCs (volatile organic compounds) and
nitrogen oxides that cause smog (the sort of choking, cloudy vehicle pollution we all know and hate).

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 Michael M. Reddy courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.
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What is a catalytic converter?

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, anyway. That's the job that a catalytic converter does.

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.

Photo: An experimental new catalytic converter designed to reduce the polluting effects of unburned fuel, nitrogen oxides and particulates.
Picture courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory published on Flickr under a Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0) licence.

One very important thing to note about catalytic converters is that they require you to use unleaded fuel, because the lead in conventional fuel
"poisons" the catalyst and prevents it from taking up the pollutants in exhaust gases.

What happens inside the converter?

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.

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Typically, there are two different catalysts in a catalytic converter:

One of them tackles nitrogen oxide pollution using a chemical process called reduction (removing oxygen). This breaks up nitrogen oxides
into nitrogen and oxygen gases (which are harmless, because they already exist in the air around us).
The other catalyst works by an opposite chemical process called oxidation (adding oxygen) and turns carbon monoxide into carbon
dioxide. Another oxidation reaction turns unburned hydrocarbons in the exhaust into carbon dioxide and water.

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).

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. Photo by
CPL Bryant V courtesy of NASA Langley Research Center (NASA-LaRC) and Internet Archive.

How effective are catalytic converters?

Cats make a big difference to emissions, with three-way converters giving a significant extra benefit over two-way converters:

Chart: Effectiveness of catalytic converters. Figures show pollutants in grams per kilometer at 80,000 kilometers. Chart drawn by Explain that
Stuff.com using data for light-duty gasoline fueled vehicles from US EPA (1990), quoted in table 3.2 (page 75) of Air Pollution from Motor
Vehicles: Standards and Technologies for Controlling Emissions, Faiz et al, World Bank, 1996.

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 seem. It's important to
remember that they reduce emissions rather than eliminate them completely.

One problem is that they only really work at high temperatures (over 300°C/600°F or so), when the engine has had chance to warm up. Early
types of catalytic converters typically took about 10–15 minutes to warm up, so they were completely ineffective for the first few
kilometers/miles of a journey (or any part of a very short journey). Modern converters warm up in only 2–3 minutes; even so, significant
emissions can still occur during this time.

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Chart: Catalytic converters only become efficient at high operating temperatures. This chart shows the efficiency of a typical device at
converting carbon monoxide at a range of different temperatures. Nitrogen oxides are converted with slightly higher efficiency and
hydrocarbons with slightly less efficiency. At high temperatures, carbon monoxide is converted with the least efficiency of the three.

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 (N2O) in the process, a greenhouse gas that's
over 300 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 in 2000, the 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 N2O emissions from gasoline
vehicles." Fortunately, newer catalytic converters produce dramatically less nitrous oxide than older ones. 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.

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:

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1. Molecules of polluting gases are pumped from the engine past the honeycomb catalyst, made from platinum, palladium, or rhodium.
2. The catalyst splits up the molecules into their atoms.
3. The atoms then recombine into molecules of relatively harmless substances such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and water, which blow out
safely through the exhaust.

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Do catalytic converters work for diesel engines?

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.

Chart: Dirty diesels? Drawn using figures from The pollutant emissions from diesel-engine vehicles and exhaust aftertreatment systems by
İbrahim Aslan Reşitoğlu et al, Clean Technologies and Environmental Policy, January 2015, Volume 17, Issue 1, itself quoting figures from
Diesel Emissions and their Control by M. Khair and W. Majewski. Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc., Warrendale, PA: 2006.

Diesel engines can and do use catalytic converters, but there are several important differences from how they work in gasoline engines.

Instead of three-way catalysts, diesels use two-way oxidation catalysts (which only tackle carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons), and 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 here.)
Catalytic converters on diesel engines do help to reduce particulate emissions (mostly soot), though only slightly; specifically, they tackle
one type of particulate known as the soluble organic fraction, SOF, made from hydrocarbons bound to soot. Diesel particulate filters
(DPFs) have to be used to make a significant impact on an engine's soot emissions.
Cars aside, diesel engines tend to power much bigger vehicles than gasoline engines (huge construction machines, for example), with
considerably greater exhaust output. Instead of a single catalytic converter fitted between the engine and the tailpipe, they may have a
number of individual units fitted in parallel to cope with the bigger exhaust gas volume (as in the diagram below).

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Artwork: Big diesel engines can produce much higher exhaust volumes, so they may need to use multiple catalytic converters "in parallel." In
this 1990s design by Caterpillar, the huge converter unit (gray) is around 1m (3.3ft) in diameter. Exhaust gas enters at the left (1), is evenly
separated into streams by a flow distributor unit (2, blue), passes through one of seven separate catalytic converter units (3, red), is quietened
by a noise muffler system (4, green), and exits, somewhat cleaned up, through the tailpipe (5). Artwork from US Patent 5,578,277: Modular
catalytic converter and muffler for internal combustion engine by Scott T. White et al, Caterpillar, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Who invented the catalytic converter?

“I like to make things happen, and that's what engineers do—they take the basic science and make things happen..”

John J. Mooney, catalytic converter pioneer

Whom do we thank for making streets and cities safer and cleaner? French chemical engineer Eugene Houdry (1892–1962) patented what
seems to have been the very first catalytic converter in the United States, filing the invention on May 5, 1950 and receiving his (US Patent
2,674,521: Catalytic converter for exhaust gases) four years later on April 6, 1954. Houdry had previously invented catalytic cracking, the
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 1970s, people started to recognize the dangers of lead, a toxic heavy
metal. In 1973, the 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 mid-1970s, and
have been used in cars ever since.

Artwork: Eugene Houdry's original catalytic converter from his 1950 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. Artwork from US Patent 2,674,521: Catalytic converter for exhaust gases, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

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 1970s by Carl Keith (1920–1988), John Mooney (1929–2020), 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.

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Artwork: In Carl Keith and John Mooney's improved design, there are two separate catalytic converters. Polluted gases flow from the engine
(red, 10), and the exhaust manifold (orange, 11), through the first catalyst (green, 13) and then the second (25), some distance away, before
exiting through the tailpipe (gray, 26). Artwork from US Patent 3,896,616: Process and Apparatus, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

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Find out more

On this website

Air pollution
Car engines (gasoline engines)
Climate change and global warming
Electrostatic smoke precipitators
Photocatalytic air purifiers

Books

Catalytic Air Pollution Control: Commercial Technology by Ronald M. Heck, Robert J. Farrauto, Suresh T. Gulati. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.
A thoroughly comprehensive guide to the topic that starts with the basic chemistry of catalysis before moving on to gasoline and diesel
engine converters, stationary sources, and topics like ozone control in airplanes and cleaning up ambient air pollution.
Air Pollution from Motor Vehicles: Standards and Technologies for Controlling Emissions by Asif Faiz, Christopher S. Weaver, and Michael
P. Walsh. World Bank Publications, 1996. Interesting technical report with an emphasis on how emissions are being controlled in practice
in the world's most developed and polluted cities. Includes many useful figures and tables and a comparison of the effectiveness of
emissions legislation in different countries. You can also download this as a PDF from the World Bank Research site.
Automobile Catalytic Converters by Kathleen C. Taylor. Springer, 1984/2012. Somewhat dated now, but still useful for background
information.

News articles
Thieves Nationwide Are Slithering Under Cars, Swiping Catalytic Converters by Hiroko Tabuchi, The New York Times, 21 February 2021.
Precious metals continue to make catalytic converters an attractive target for thieves.
John J. Mooney, an Inventor of the Catalytic Converter, Dies at 90 by Sam Roberts, The New York Times, 25 June 2020. Looking back at
the life of the engineer who pioneered three-way catalytic converters.
Inventor in cleaner engine claim: BBC News, 22 January 2010. A Scottish inventor claims to have developed a cool-running engine that
produces virtually no particulate (soot) emissions.
As Platinum Soars, the Catalytic Converter Gets Hot by Matthew Phenix. Wired, 17 February 2008. Why thieves think the soaring price
of platinum makes catalytic converters worth stealing
Autos' Converters Cut Smog But Add to Global Warming by Matthew Wald. The New York Times, 29 May 1998. The EPA issues a report
highlighting problems with nitrogen oxide.
Are catalytic converters really "green"?: The Guardian, Notes and Queries. Readers give their opinions on whether cats really help the
planet.
Catalytic Converter: Big 'If' of 1975 by Robert W. Irvin. The New York Times, October 13, 1974. This article from the archives shows how
the auto industry had serious concerns about the effectiveness of catalytic converters when they were first introduced in the mid-1970s.

Patents

US Patent 2,674,521: Catalytic converter for exhaust gases by Eugene Houdry, April 6, 1954. In this very readable patent, Houdry
explains why he developed catalytic conveters and the various technical problems he had to solve in the process (such as tackling the

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gases produced by widely varying driving conditions).
US Patent 3,896,616: Process and Apparatus by Carl D Keith and John J Mooney, July 29, 1975. Another very readable patent, this one
describes the improved three-way catalytic converter found in most modern vehicles.
US Patent 4,672,809: Catalytic converter for a diesel engine by Richard C. Cornelison and William B. Retallick, W R Grace and Co, June
16, 1987. Describes some of the challenges of making a catalytic converter work with diesel engine emissions.
US Patent 5,578,277: Modular catalytic converter and muffler for internal combustion engine by Scott T. White et al, Caterpillar,
November 26, 1996. This patent explains how multiple catalytic units work together on the tailpipe emissions from a very large diesel
engine.

Practical articles
Testing and repairing catalytic converters by Mort Schultz, Popular Mechanics, December 1985. A dated—but still very interesting—
article that explains different types of catalytic converters and explores reasons for their failure.

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