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An improvement of thermal efficiency of internal combustion engines is strongly required. Meanwhile, from the viewpoint of refinery, CO2 emissions and gasoline price decrease when lower octane gasoline can be used for vehicles. If lower octane gasoline is used for current vehicles, fuel consumption rate would increase due to abnormal combustion. However, if a Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engine were to be used, the effect of octane number on engine performance would be relatively small and it has been revealed that the thermal efficiency is almost unchanged. In this study, the engine performance estimation of HCCI combustion using lower octane gasoline as a vision of the future engine was achieved. To quantitatively investigate the fuel consumption performance of a gasoline HCCI engine using lower octane fuel, the estimation of fuel consumption under different driving test cycles with different transmissions is carried out using 1D engine simulation code.

The authors investigated the reasons of how a preignition occurs in a highly boosted gasoline engine. Based on the authors' experimental results, theoretical investigations on the processes of how a particle of oil or solid comes out into the cylinder and how a preignition occurs from the particle. As a result, many factors, such as the in-cylinder temperature, the pressure, the equivalence ratio and the component of additives in the lubricating oil were found to affect the processes. Especially, CaCO3 included in an oil as an additive may be changed to CaO by heating during the expansion and exhaust strokes. Thereafter, CaO will be converted into CaCO3 again by absorbing CO2 during the intake and compression strokes. As this change is an exothermic reaction, the temperature of CaCO3 particle increases over 1000K of the chemical equilibrium temperature determined by the CO2 partial pressure.

LSPI is an important issue to enable and enhance the effect of downsizing in SI engines. Experimental work was carried out by using 4 cylinder turbocharged gasoline engine, attaching the extra supercharger to get a higher boost pressure. Many parameters of driving condition, engine specification and lubricants were studied and some of them were extracted as the major items which affect the possibility of LSPI. Coolant temperature and Calcium (Ca) additive to lubricant had strong effect on the frequency of LSPI. Combustion strategy of strong miller cycle and LPEGR were also studied and compared in very high BMEP condition. Finally IMEPg of 3MPa at 1500rpm was achieved by using a single cylinder test engine equipped with 2-stage mechanically supercharged intake system.