I have wondered what a catalytic converter looks like inside when it's functioning ever
since I saw this glowing orange light coming from underneath my RX-7 and realized that
it was the catalytic converter and I'm pretty sure this is because rotaries are known for
dumping a lot of unburned fuel into the exhaust probably causes the catalytic converter to
get that hot and that's one of the reasons I want to see what's happening inside while
it's working the catalytic converter is something that almost every car in the world has its
purpose is to reduce harmful emissions created by incomplete combustion I'm focusing mostly
on the visual aspect of the catalytic converter working if you're interested in the detailed
explanation on how the process takes place I left a few links in the description below
but for now I'm going to get to work building my see-through catalytic converters
I'm all done building my first see-through catalytic converter
the idea here is to see what's happening
inside the catalytic converter when it's working and in order to do that I need to hook it
up to my engine right here and I'm not making any promises because I've never done this
before I'm going to run at normal then I'm going to run it rich I want to see what happens
in those two scenarios and I don't know what this is going to look like because I've never
done this before but we're about to find out this engine is not like that little 3 horsepower
this sucker is loud so
here it goes
that was kind of interesting as you can see I started
it up with the regular mixture already warmed up and then I added choke and what that does
is a richens the mixture adds a lot more fuel as soon as I did that you can see the catalytic
loved thatit just started glowing red hot and doing its job
unfortunately my seal came apart and my glass came off and cracked
I'm going to move on
to the next version all of this catalytic converter
as you can see this catalytic converter
is a full-size catalytic converter through one is tiny in comparison so
all my clamps are tight
I'm just going to start it up and do the same thing I did before all right so
let's do it
in this case the high speed camera didn't reveal a huge amount of extra information
but that fireball near the outlet of the catalytic converter
there is a clear indication that there is hydrocarbons being burned
inside the catalyst because there is no fire going in
but there's Fire coming out
that was a lot of fun I always expect more than what
I get I always want it to look better that looks pretty cool definitely gave me a really
good idea of what the catalytic job is I mean I kind of already knew I like I said I wanted
to see inside I mean it got so hot that I melted my steel rod I don't know if you remember
the shape of this when I put it in but it didn't look like that let's just take a look
and see what I was doing was I was hitting the choke and the throttle letting it dump
gas in there and that's where we're getting those fireballs from but this is what's left
over it's a little torn up it looks perfectly new because because this is designed to get
hot and that's its job so that's it that's it for this video that's all I wanted to do
was see how a catalytic looked if we were able to look inside while it was functioning
and that was about it so hopefully you enjoyed this video tell me what you think in the comments
below don't forget to subscribe if you're not already subscribed and check out that
bell and yeah tell me what you thought about this project and any variations of it I'm
curious to see what people think this is basically the only reason I did this video to see inside
to see inside of a catalytic converter while it was functioning and that's what I did