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In this study, we investigated the relationship of indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP) for a spark ignition engine under lean combustion with the cyclic variation of mass fraction burned by measuring the energy release from the spark plug, intensity of the light emmision from the flame and the cylinder pressure at the same time. In order to minimized an error in the initial and late combustion stages of the mass fraction burned to be obtained by cylinder pressure, spark plug energy and intensity of light emission were measured. As a result, it was found that there are three main couses of cyclic variation of IMEP. These consist of the burning speed during the initial stage of combustion, variation in the total mass fraction burned, and variation of the late burning during the late expantion stroke. Thus, we determined that there is a favorable interrelatonship between the IMEPs and the corrected mass fraction burned.

A combustion flame visualization system, for use as an engine diagnostics tool, was developed in order to evaluate combustion chamber shapes in the development stage of mass-produced spark ignition (S.I.) engines. The system consists of an image converter camera and a computer-aided image processing system. The system is capable of high speed photography (10,000 fps) at low intensity light (1,000 cd/m2), and of real-time display of the raw images of combustion flames. By using this system, flame structure estimated from the brightness level on a photograph and direction of flame propagation in a mass-produced 4-valve engine were measured. It was observed that the difference in the structure and the propagation of the flame in the cases of 4-valve and quasi-2-valve combustion chambers, which had the same in the pressure diagram, were detected. The quasi-2-valve configuration was adopted in order to improve swirl intensity.