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Originally Posted by rallen
catalytic converters get vey hot, 400 C I was told. Given, they are not water cooled, only air cooled. But. If I took out the cat and replaced with steel tubing, would it also reach 400 C? If not then it would mean the cat converter is actually "burning" something present in the exhaust fumes.
From what little I can remember it uses some metals/alloys/ceramics to react chemically with the exhaust fumes and trap some CO or NO2 gases??
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Yes, the catalytic converter is coated with a very thin layer of platinum. The cat converter "catalyzes a reaction), that is, it does something that would happen anyway without the cat, but at much greater efficiency. So, replacing the cat with steel tubing would not work. The cat converter get's so hot because the breakdown of these hydrocarbons into less toxic hydrocarbons is what is termed as and "exothermic" reaction, which means the energy from the chemical bonds, when they break, that energy is transformed into heat.