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The paper is based on the premise that the sole purpose of combustion in piston engines is to generate pressure for pushing the expansion process away from the compression process (both expressed in terms of appropriate polytropes) to create a work producing cycle. This essential process, referred to as the dynamic stage of combustion, is carved out of the cycle and its salient properties deduced from the measured pressure profile, as a solution of an inverse problem: deduction of information on an action from its outcome. An analytical technique, construed for this purpose, is first presented and, then, applied to a direct injection, spark-ignition, methanol fueled four-stroke engine.

The sole purpose of combustion in a piston engine is to generate pressure in order to push the piston and produce work. Pressure diagnostics provides means to deduce data on the execution of the exothermic process of combustion in an engine cylinder from a measured pressure profile. Its task is that of an inverse problem: evaluation of the mechanism of a system from its measured output. The dynamic properties of the closed system in a piston engine are expressed in terms of a dynamic stage - the transition between the processes of compression and expansion. All the phenomena taking place in its course were analyzed in the predecessor of this paper, SAE 2002-01-0998. Here, on one hand, its concept is restricted to the purely dynamic effects, while on the other, the transformation of system components, taking place in the course of the exothermic chemical reaction to raise pressure, are taken into account by the exothermic stage.