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Over the years, spark-ignition engine operation has changed significantly, driven by many factors including changes in operating conditions. The variation in operating conditions impacts the state of the end-gas, and therefore, its auto-ignition. This can be quantified in terms of K-factor, which weighs the relative contribution of Research Octane Number (RON) and Motor Octane Number (MON) to knocking tendency at any operating condition. The current study investigates the fuel requirements when operating an engine at increasing intake air pressures. A model engine was operated at varying intake air pressure in GT-Power software, from naturally aspirated intake air to heavily boosted intake air pressure of 4 bar absolute. The pressure-temperature information from the GT-Power model was used to calculate ignition delay times of the unburnt end-gas composed of a sensitive and a non-sensitive fuel in ChemKin software.

The present study experimentally examines the low-temperature autoignition area of isooctane within the in-cylinder pressure-in-cylinder temperature map. Experiments were run with the help of a Cooperative Fuel Research (CFR) engine. The boundaries of this engine were extended so that experiments could be performed outside the domain delimited by research octane number (RON) and motor octane number (MON) traces. Since homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion is governed by kinetics, the rotation speed for all the experiments was set at 600 rpm to allow time for low-temperature heat release (LTHR). All the other parameters (intake pressure, intake temperature, compression ratio, and equivalence ratio) were scanned, such as the occurrence of isooctane combustion. The principal results showed that LTHR for isooctane occurs effortlessly under high intake pressure (1.3 bar) and low intake temperature (25 °C).

The auto-ignition characteristics of diethyl ether (DEE)/ethanol mixtures are investigated in compression ignition (CI) engines both numerically and experimentally. While DEE has a higher derived cetane number (DCN) of 139, ethanol exhibits poor ignition characteristics with a DCN of 8. DEE was used as an ignition promoter for the operation of ethanol in a CI engine. Mixtures of DEE and ethanol (DE), i.e., DE75 (75% DEE + 25% ethanol), DE50 (50% DEE + 50% ethanol) and DE25 (25% DEE + 75% ethanol), were tested in a CI engine. While DE75 and DE50 auto-ignited at an inlet air pressure of 1.5 bar, DE25 failed to auto-ignite even at boosted pressure of 2 bar. The peak in-cylinder pressure for diesel and DE75 were comparable, while DE50 showed reduced peak in-cylinder pressure with delayed start of combustion (SOC). Numerical simulations were conducted to study the engine combustion characteristics of DE mixture.