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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.

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.

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.

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.

Some SI (spark-ignition) engines fueled with gasoline for industrial machineries are designed based on the conventional diesel engine in consideration of the compatibility with installation. Such diesel engine-based SI engines secure a combustion chamber by a piston bowl instead of a pent-roof combustion chamber widely applied for SI engines for automobiles. In the development of SI engines, because knocking deteriorates the power output and the thermal efficiency, it is essential to clarify causes of knocking and predict knocking events. However, there has been little research on knocking in diesel engine-based SI engines. The purpose of this study is to elucidate knocking phenomena in a gasoline engine with a re-entrant piston bowl and swirl flow numerically and experimentally. In-cylinder visualization and pressure analysis of knock onset cycles have been experimentally performed. Locations of autoignition have been predicted by 3D-CFD analysis with detailed chemical reactions.

In recent years, the improvement in the fuel efficiency and reduction in CO2 emission from internal combustion engines has been an urgent issue. The lean burn technology is one of the key technologies to improve thermal efficiency of SI engines. However, combustion stability deteriorates at lean burn operations. The reduction in cycle-to-cycle and cylinder-to-cylinder variations is one of the major issues to adapt the lean burn technique for production engines. However, the details of the causes and mechanisms for the combustion variations under the lean burn operations have not been cleared yet. The purpose of this study is to control cylinder to cylinder combustion variation. A conventional turbocharged direct injection SI engine was used as the test engine to investigate the effect of engine control parameters on the cylinder to cylinder variations. The engine speed is set at 2200 rpm and the intake pressure is set at 58, 78, 98 kPa respectively.

To increase thermal efficiency of internal combustion engines, dilution combustion systems, such as lean burn and exhaust gas recirculation systems, have been developed. These systems require spark-ignition coils generating large discharge current and discharge energy to achieve stable ignition under diluted mixture conditions. Several studies have clarified that larger discharge current increases spark-channel stretch and decreases the possibility of spark channel blow-off and misfire. However, these investigations do not mention the effect of larger discharge current and energy on the initial combustion period. The purpose of this study was to investigate the relation among dilution ratio, initial-combustion period, and coil specifications to clarify the control factor of the dilution limit.

Low temperature plasma ignition has been proposed as a new ignition technique as it has features of good wear resistance, low energy release and combustion enhancement. In the authors’ previous study, lean burn limit could be extended slightly by low temperature plasma ignition while the power supply’s performance with steep voltage rising with time (dV/dt), showed higher peak value of the rate of heat release and better indicated thermal efficiency. In this study, basic study of low temperature plasma ignition system was carried out to find out the reason of combustion enhancement. Moreover, the durability test of low temperature plasma plug was performed to check the wear resistance.

NOx emissions from diesel passenger vehicles affect the atmospheric environment. It is difficult to evaluate the NOx emissions influenced by environmental conditions such as humidity and temperature, traffic conditions, driving patterns, etc. In the authors’ previous study, real-driving experiments were performed on city and highway routes using a diesel passenger car with only an exhaust gas recirculation system. A statistical prediction model of NOx emissions was considered for simple estimations in the real world using instantaneous vehicle data measured by the portable emissions measurement system and global positioning system. The prediction model consisted of explanatory variables, such as velocity, acceleration, road gradient, and position of transmission gear. Using the explanatory variables, NOx emissions on the city and highway routes was well predicted using a diesel vehicle without NOx reduction devices.

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.

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.

Reduction in the cycle-to-cycle variation (CCV) of combustion in internal combustion engines is required to reduce fuel consumption, exhaust emissions, and improve drivability. CCV increases at low load operations and lean/dilute burn conditions. Specifically, the factors that cause CCV of combustion are the cyclic variations of in-cylinder flow, in-cylinder distributions of fuel concentration, temperature and residual gas, and ignition energy. However, it is difficult to measure and analyze these factors in a production engine. This study used an optically accessible single-cylinder engine in which combustion and optical measurements were performed for 45 consecutive cycles. CCVs of the combustion and in-cylinder phenomena were investigated for the same cycle. Using this optically accessible engine, the volume inside the combustion chamber, including the pent-roof region can be observed through a quartz cylinder.

Among the emerging technologies in order to meet ever stringent emission and fuel consumption regulations, Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) system is becoming one of the prerequisites particularly for diesel engines. Although EGR cooler is considered to be an effective measure for further performance enhancement, exhaust gas soot deposition may cause degradation of the cooling. To address this issue, the authors studied the visualization of the soot deposition and removal phenomena to understand its behavior. Based on thermophoresis theory, which indicates that the effect of thermophoresis depends on the temperature difference between the gas and the wall surface exposed to the gas, a visualization method using a heated glass window was developed. By using glass with the transparent conductive oxide: tin-doped indium oxide, temperature of the heated glass surface is raised.

To understand the mechanism of the combustion by torch flame jet in a gas engine with pre-chamber and also to obtain the strategy of improving thermal efficiency by optimizing the structure of pre-chamber including the diameter and number of orifices, the combustion process was investigated by three dimensional numerical simulations and experiments of a single cylinder natural gas engine. As a result, the configuration of orifices was found to affect the combustion performance strongly. With the same orifice diameter of 1.5mm, thermal efficiency with 7 orifices in pre-chamber was higher than that with 4 orifices in pre-chamber, mainly due to the reduction of heat loss by decreasing the impingement of torch flame on the cylinder linear. Better thermal efficiency was achieved in this case because the flame propagated area increases rapidly while the flame jets do not impinge on the cylinder wall intensively.

In order to realize the high compression ratio and high dilution combustion toward improvement in thermal efficiency, the improvement in stability of ignition and initial phase of combustion under the high gas flow field is the major challenge. In terms of the shift on the higher power side of the operating point by downsizing and improvement of real world fuel consumption, the improvement of ignitability is increasingly expected in the wide operating range also including high load and high engine speed region. In this study, the effects of the gas pressure, gas flow velocity near the spark gap at ignition timing, and discharge current characteristics on spark channel formation were analyzed, focusing on restrike event and spark channel stretching in the spark channel formation process. And the relationship between the average discharge current until 1 ms and the EGR combustion limit was considered.

The objective of this study is to extend the high load operation limit of a gasoline HCCI engine. A new system extending the high load HCCI operation limit was proposed, and the performance of the system was experimentally demonstrated. The proposed system consists of two new techniques. The first one is the “Blow-down super charging (BDSC) system”, in which, EGR gas can be super charged into a cylinder during the early stage of compression stroke by using the exhaust blow-down pressure wave from another cylinder phased 360 degrees later/earlier in the firing order. The other one is “EGR guide” for generating a large thermal stratification inside the cylinder to reduce the rate of in-cylinder pressure rise (dP/dθ) at high load HCCI operation. The EGR guides consist of a half-circular part attached on the edge of the exhaust ports and the piston head which has a protuberant surface to control the mixing between hot EGR gas and intake air-fuel mixture.

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.

The phenomenon of autoignition is an important aspect of HCCI and knock, hence reliable information on local gas temperature in a combustion chamber must be obtained. Recently, several studies have been conducted by using laser techniques such as CARS. It has a high spatial resolution, but has proven difficult to apply in the vicinity of combustion chamber wall and requires special measurement skills. Meanwhile, a thermocouple is useful to measure local gas temperature even in the vicinity of wall. However, a traditional one-wire thermocouple is not adaptable to measure the in-cylinder gas temperature due to slow response. The issue of response can be overcome by adopting a two-wire thermocouple. The two-wire thermocouple is consisted of two fine wire thermocouples with different diameter hence it is possible to determine the time constant using the raw data from each thermocouple.