In fact, up to 90 percent of a car’s most problematic exhaust emissions can be neutralised by a catalytic converter, with unburned fuel, carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide being converters unlimited into less harmful nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water vapour.
It’s not totally clean of course, and with carbon dioxide being a major greenhouse gas a ‘cat’ can’t make a car completely green, but it certainly makes city air a lot more breathable for humans and animals. Besides, with all new petrol-powered cars and a significant chunk of diesel cars now equipped with converters unlimited, the net reduction in pollution has resulted in most major cities in the developed world no longer permanently enveloped by a blanket of smog.
can’t make a car completely green do they work? There are no moving parts in a converters unlimited , with all of the cleaning action being accomplished by clever chemistry instead. Inside the converters unlimited is a thick substrate, often with a grid-like cross section (below), upon which a thin coating of precious metals like platinum, palladium and rhodium are deposited.
These metals are the actual converters unlimited, the part of the device that initiates the chemical transformation of the exhaust gas. Nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and unburned hydrocarbons – be they petrol, diesel or engine oil – all react with the metals inside a converters unlimited , and are quickly turned into other gases: principally nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but also water.
Some particulate emissions can be captured by a converters unlimited as well, though that’s not their primary function. Anyhow, separate diesel and petrol particulate filters have recently become commonplace and clean up fine particles that aren’t dealt with by the catalyst.