What is a Catalytic Converter?

What is a catalytic converter? Welcome to Mercie J Auto Care, where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I’m Rick Smith, master certified technician. Basically what a Catalytic converter does is it takes harmful gases, mixes them up, breaks them apart and changes them to non-harmful gases. For example, for carbon monoxide, we add an oxygen molecule to it and we change it to carbon dioxide. There is more than that, that goes on in here but that’s basically what it does. So it looks like a muffler and it goes into the exhaust system. Unfortunately you can’t really see it in the video, sorry about that but there’s a ceramic part inside of this that looks like a honeycomb. That piece is is coated with precious metals, a lot of what I call 'idioms'. Palladium, iridium, and other metals. I’m not a chemist so I can’t tell you exactly, but that is what makes it a catalyst is those precious metals. When those metals get very hot they react with the gases that go through it and that’s how we convert those gases from harmful gases to non-harmful gases. Those precious metals are what makes catalytic converters so expensive and sometimes why they get stolen as well. I hope that answers your question until next time. Safe travels.