Tenneco is looking to expand its clean air segment through growing its offerings to include waste heat recovery.
Tenneco CEO Brian Kesseler says more than 70 percent of the company’s business comes from cabin air cleaner products with 11 percent of its revenue coming from commercial trucking and off-highway. Regulations and market trends are driving Tenneco’s growth as more diesel engines globally will be coming under regulations than are currently under regulation today.
Tenneco is one of the original suppliers of an after treatment dosing system but Ben Patel, chief technology officer, says waste heat recovery will play a role in meeting emissions reduction regulations going forward.
“If you’re in the emission reduction game, heat is your friend,” Patel says. “Anything we can do to extract the heat that is already there, we want to contemplate. When you get to 55 percent of brake thermal efficiency, and with all low hanging fruit has been absorbed, harvesting back that free heat [will be important].”
The company’s Euro IV concept box is a compact and modular one-box solution that includes all required exhaust after treatment components, such as DOC, DPF and SCR converters as well as the company’s proprietary advanced mixing technology. The concept box also features advanced technologies designed to support further reductions in NOx emissions and In-Service Conformity (ISC) requirements, including thermal management solutions such as lightweight fabricated manifolds and active heaters to support low temperature NOx efficiency. Another important focus for the commercial vehicle market – driven by total cost of ownership and CO2 legislation – is waste heat recovery. Tenneco is developing solutions to provide or integrate heat exchangers into the Euro VI box as a key component of Rankine cycle-based systems that convert wasted exhaust heat into mechanical power.
An innovation in its dosing module, the company has taken the injector, pump, sensors and board and integrated them into a single urea dosing system.
“This [simplified] approach is very attractive,” Patel says.
