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Liquid fuel attached to the wall surface of the intake port, the piston and the combustion chamber is one of the main causes of the unburned hydrocarbon emissions from a port fueled SI engine, especially during transient operations. To investigate the liquid fuel film formation process and fuel film behavior during transient operation is essential to reduce exhaust emissions in real driving operations, including cold start operations. Optical techniques have been often applied to measure the fuel film in conventional reports, however, it is difficult to apply those previous techniques to actual engines during transient operations. In this study, using MEMS technique, a novel capacitance sensor has been developed to detect liquid fuel film formation and evaporation processes in actual engines. A resistance temperature detector (RTD) was also constructed on the MEMS sensor with the capacitance sensor to measure the sensor surface temperature.

A reverse uniflow-type two-stroke gasoline direct injection engine, which has potentials of high power weight ratio, high thermal efficiency and low exhaust gas emissions, has been developed and tested. In this study, one of the features of this engine: very low cycle-to-cycle combustion variation at idling condition, is focused to clarify the reasons. To achieve this, a transparent cylinder model engine was designed and built to visualize the in-cylinder mixture formation process, and the free spray characteristics of a swirl-type injector were examined using a large chamber with changing the injection pressure, environmental gas pressure, and the gas temperature. As a result, the reasons of stable idling operation were deduced.

A Direct Injection Stratified Charge Rotary Engine (DISC-RE) with a pilot flame ignition system which has high ignition energy, large flame contact area and long duration of ignition source, has been examined comparing with a spark ignition system, using a model combustion chamber simulating a DISC-RE. As a result, it was found that the combustion using the pilot flame ignition system was activated and that a better ignitability was attained under lean mixture conditions than using a spark ignition system. To analyze these experimental results, numerical calculations of the mixture formation and combustion process were carried out. Numerical analyses proved that the pilot flame ignition system was superior to the spark ignition system as the pilot flame ignition made large-area ignition source and large inflammable mixture region. Finally, a single rotor with 650 cc displacement DISC-RE was built as a prototype.

For a disaster relief and automatic inspections, an unmanned helicopter is strongly expected. To develop this, a very high power density source is required. A Wankel-type rotary engine can be the best candidate for the power source. In this study, the development of a very small rotary engine with a displacement of 30 cc is targeted. In order to improve the combustion efficiency, gas exchange and stable ignition, a multi dimensional simulation inside the combustion chamber was carried out. At first, the effect of volumetric efficiency on the maximum power is mentioned. Secondly, the effect of scavenging efficiency is discussed. Thirdly, a blow off through a plug hole is described. The position of plug hole was found important to reduce the blow off amount. Finally, the effect of combustion speed on the engine performance is predicted. As a result, the proposed design will be tested using a proto-type engine.

Experimental methods and numerical analysis were used to investigate the mechanism of high-speed knocking that occurs in small two-stroke engines. The multi-ion probe method was used in the experiments to visualize flame propagation in the cylinder. The flame was detected by 14 ion probes grounded in the end gas region. A histogram was made of the order in which flames were detected. The characteristics of combustion in the cylinder were clarified by comparing warming up and after warming up and by extracting the features of the cycle in which knocking occurred. As a result, regions of fast flame propagation and regions prone to auto-ignition were identified. In the numerical analysis, flow and residual gas distribution in the cylinder, flame propagation and self-ignition were visualized by 3D CFD using 1D CFD calculation results as boundary conditions and initial conditions.

To investigate the heat transfer phenomena inside the combustion chamber of a diesel engine, a correlation for the heat transfer coefficient in a combustion chamber of a diesel engine was investigated based on heat flux measured by the authors in the previous study(8) using the rapid compression and expansion machine. In the correlation defined in the present study, thermodynamically estimated two-zone temperatures in the burned zone and the unburned zone are applied. The characteristic velocity given in the correlation is related to the speed of spray flame impinging on the wall during the fuel injection period. After the fuel injection period, the velocity term of the Woschni’s equation is applied. It was shown that the proposed correlation well expresses heat transfer phenomena in diesel engines.

An optimization of thermal management system in a gasoline engine is considered to improve thermal efficiency by minimizing the cost increase without largely changing the configuration of engine system. In this study, the influence of water temperature and intake air temperature on thermal efficiency were investigated using an inline four-cylinder 1.2L gasoline engine. In addition, one-dimensional engine simulations were conducted by using a software of GT-SUITE. Brake thermal efficiency for different engine speeds and loads could be quantitatively predicted with changing the cooling water temperature in the cylinder head. Then, in order to predict the improvement of the fuel consumption in actual use, vehicle mode running simulation and general-purpose engine transient mode simulation were carried out by GT-SUITE. As a result, it was found that by controlling the temperatures of the cooling water and intake gas, thermal efficiency can be improved by several percent.

It has been widely known that thermal and fuel stratifications of in-cylinder mixture are effective to reduce in-cylinder pressure rise rate during high load HCCI operations. In order to optimize a combustion chamber design and combustion control strategy for HCCI engines with wide operational range, it is important to know quantitatively the influence of the temperature and fuel concentration distributions on ignition and heat release characteristics. At the same time, it is important to know the influence of in-cylinder flow and turbulence on the temperature and fuel concentration distributions. In this study, a numerical simulation of HCCI combustion were conducted to investigate the effects of the in-cylinder flow and turbulence, and the distributions of temperature on ignition and combustion characteristics in HCCI combustion.

Porous materials, which have large surface areas, have been used for heat storage. However, porous Si-SiC material, as heat storage medium to be applied to a turbocharged gasoline engine has not been investigated extensively. In this study, porous Si-SiC material was used in the upstream of the turbine as heat storage medium and a model was thereby developed for further study. Substrate surface area and substrate volume of Si-SiC were calculated for structure model calibration. Following these calculations and test results, the pressure loss and thermal model were validated. Results show that the weaken exhaust gas pulsation amplitude by porous Si-SiC leads to better turbine performance and BSFC in steady engine condition for a turbocharged gasoline engine. In addition, its transient operation response needs to be improved under transient engine conditions. Hence the possibility of improving the transient response is investigated with characteristics of porous Si-SiC material.

This study aimed to achieve both a high compression ratio and low knock intensity in a two-stroke engine. Previous research has suggested that knock intensity can be reduced by combining combustion chamber geometry and scavenging passaging design for the same engine specifications with a compression ratio of 13.7. In this report, we investigate whether low knock intensity can be achieved at compression ratios of 14.4 and 16.8 by adjusting the combustion chamber geometry and scavenging passage design. As a result, the mechanism by which combustion chamber geometry and scavenging passage design change knock intensity was clarified.

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion is promising for not only high thermal efficiency but also reducing nitrogen oxides (NOx) and PM simultaneously. However, the operational range of the HCCI combustion is limited because of some issues, such as poor control of ignition timing and knocking by the excessive rate of pressure rise. In this study, a new combustion system based on the HCCI combustion process is proposed based on the authors' previous experimental work. This combustion system has a divided combustion chamber of two parts, one is small and the other is large. The most significant feature is the small chamber inside the piston. At first, combustion takes place in the small chamber, and then the burned gas is ejected into the large chamber to ignite the mixture in the large chamber.

Post-oxidation has been used to enhance the chemical reactions in the exhaust gas pipes, leading to the activations of the turbocharger and catalyst at cold state. In this research, a detailed study of the various mechanisms for post-oxidation is performed. For the post-oxidation activation, the unburned gas species (CO, THC, H2) in the exhaust manifold must be produced by some methodologies, such as scavenging, lambda-split, and post-injection. The required amount of O2 concentration can be either supplied by the scavenging (valve overlap tuning) or the secondary air injection (SAI) system. Mixing the species is also an important key to promoting post- oxidation, and an internal bypass adapter with a modified exhaust adapter shape was developed and evaluated.