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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.

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.

In this study, to satisfy increasingly strict emission regulations, the conversion efficiency of a 0.11 mm (4 mil) thin-wall catalyst is discussed. The effects of catalyst bulk density on reducing heat mass to improve catalyst emission conversion in the early cold transient mode (Bag 1 in the FTP-75 mode) is quantitatively discussed. To analyze the effects of low heat mass, catalyst's bed temperatures were measured. Effects of the geometric surface area (GSA) and volume of the catalyst were also analyzed. An early feedback control system with an HEGO oxygen sensor and a secondary air injection control system with an original oxygen sensor were compared with an original control system on THC, CO, and NOx emission amounts.

To drastically improve thermal efficiency of a gasoline spark-ignited engine, super-lean burn is a promising solution. Although, studies of lean burn have been made by so many researchers, the realization is blocked by a cycle-to-cycle combustion variation. In this study, based on the causes of cycle-to-cycle variation clarified by the authors’ previous study, a unique method to reduce the cycle-to-cycle variation is proposed and evaluated. That is, a bulk quench at early expansion stroke could be reduced by making slight fuel stratification inside the cylinder using the twin-tumble of intake flows. As a result, the lean limit was extended with keeping low NOx and moderate THC emissions, leading to higher thermal efficiency.

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.

Lean combustion has been well known to be an effective method to improve the thermal efficiency. However, leaner mixture is prone to cause the unstable combustion and poorer unburned hydrocarbon (UTHC) emissions. Pre-chamber turbulent jet combustion has been proved to enhance the combustion stability under ultra-lean conditions. However, more NOx is formed during the combustion, resulting in the fact that the tailpipe NOx emission is too high to be still not available for the real application. In this report, in order to achieve a higher air excess ratio while keeping lower UTHC emissions, and especially NOx emission, a new combustion technique which combined pre-chamber jet combustion with fuel reforming was proposed and experimentally demonstrated on a pre-chamber engine.