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In this research, a spark plug with an optical fiber has been developed to obtain the emission spectra from the spark discharge and flame kernel. This developed spark plug with an optical fiber can obtain the time series of emission spectra from the spark discharge and Initial flame kernel in the real spark-ignition engine using EMCCD spectrometer. The plasma vibrational temperature of the spark discharge can be measured using the emission spectra from the electrically excited CN violet band system. The plasma of the spark discharge and gas rotational temperature of the initial flame kernel can be also measured using emission spectra from OH* radicals (P and R branches). The plasma temperature of the spark discharge was almost 8,000 K and the gas temperature of the Initial flame kernel approached that of the adiabatic flame temperature.

The objective of this study is to investigate the initial flame propagation characteristics of turbulent flame in an engine cylinder through time-series analysis of radical emissions. A spark plug with optical fiber was developed in this study. The plug sensor is M12 type that makes it possible to mount in practical engine. The spark plug sensor can detect radical emissions in time-resolved spectra through time-series spectroscopic measurement. In this spectra, some kinds of radical emissions such as OH*(306nm), CH*(431nm) and C2*(517nm) based on principle of chemiluminescence are observed. In this study, the spark plug sensor was applied to both compression-expansion machine (CEM) and practical engine. As a result of CEM with bottom viewed high-speed camera, three kinds of spectra could be detected.

Bio-gas as an internal combustion (I.C.) engine fuel has many advantages such as cheaper fuel cost, low emission levels and especially the neutral recirculation loop of carbon dioxide, which is one of the principal factors in global warming. In this study, positive potentialities of bio-gas were investigated using a micro co-generation engine. The mixing ratio of methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2) was changed to simulate various types of bio-gases. Intake air and fuel flow rates were controlled to change the equivalence ratio. The engine load condition could be changed with the electric output power used. Base on the result, the higher CO2 content rate slowed down the engine speed in the same load condition and the combustion speed generally decreased under the same load condition with maintaining the engine speed. However thermal efficiency increased with lean burn conditions and NOX emission decreased with higher CO2 mixing rates.

Non-intrusive measurement of transient unburned gas temperatures was developed with a fiber-optic heterodyne interferometry system. Using the value of the Gladstone-Dale constant for DME gas and combustion pressure we can calculate the in-cylinder temperature inside unburned and burned region. In this experimental study, it was performed to set up a fiber-optic heterodyne interferometry technique to measure the temperature before and behind the combustion region in a DME-HCCI engine. At first, measured temperature was almost the same as the temperature history assuming that the process that changes of the unburned and the burned are polytropic. In addition, we measured the temperature after combustion which of condition was burned gas with DME-HCCI combustion. The developed heterodyne interferometry used the spark-plug-in fiber-optic sensor has a good feasibility to measure the unburned and burned temperature history.

An in-spark-plug flame sensor was developed to measure local chemiluminescence near the spark gap in a practical spark-ignition (SI) engine in order to study the development of the initial flame kernel, flame front structure, transient phenomena, and the correlation between the initial flame kernel structure and cyclic variation in the flame front structure, which influences engine performance directly. The sensor consists of a commercial instrumented spark plug with small Cassegrain optics and an optical fiber. The small Cassegrain optics were developed to measure the local chemiluminescence intensity profile and temporal history of OH*, CH*, and C2* at the flame front formed in a turbulent premixed flame in an SI engine. A highresolution monochromator with an intensified chargecoupled device (ICCD) and spectroscopy using optical filters and photomultiplier tubes (PMTs) were used to measure the time-series of the three radicals, as well as the in-cylinder pressure.

In this study, a spark plug sensor for in-situ fuel concentration measurement was applied to a port injected lean-burn engine. Laser infrared absorption method was employed and a 3.392 μm He-Ne laser that coincides with the absorption line of hydrocarbons was used as a light source. In this engine, the secondary valve lift height of intake system was controlled to obtain appropriate swirl and tumble flow in order to achieve lean-burn with the characteristics of intake flow. For such in-cylinder stratified mixture distribution, the fuel concentration near the spark plug is very important factor that affects the combustion characteristics. Therefore, the mixture formation process near the spark plug was investigated with changing fuel injection timing. Under the intake stroke, the timing that fuel passed through near the spark plug depended largely on the fuel injection timing.

A heterodyne interferometry system with a fiber-optic sensor was developed to measure the temperature history of unburned gas in an engine cylinder. A polarization-preserving fiber and metal mirror were used as the fiber-optic sensor to deliver the test beam to and from the measurement region. This fiber-optic sensor can be assembled in the engine cylinder or the cylinder head without a lot of improvements of an actual engine. The feasibility of our system was sufficient to be applied to temperature history measurement of an unburned gas compressed by flame propagation in an engine cylinder. The resolution of the temperature measurement is approximately 0.7 K, and is dependent on both the sampling clock speed of the A/D converter and the length of the measurement region.

A fiber optical heterodyne interferometry system was developed to obtain high temporal resolution temperature histories of unburned and burned gases non-intrusively. The effective optical path length of the test beam changes with the gas density and corresponding changes of the refractive index. Therefore, the temperature history of the gas can be determined from the pressure and phase shift of the interference signal. The resolution of the temperature measurement is approximately 0.5 K, and is dependent upon both the sampling clock speed of the A/D converter and the length of the test section. A polarization-preserving fiber is used to deliver the test beam to and from the test section, to improve the feasibility of the system as a sensor probe. This optical heterodyne interferometry system may also be used for other applications that require gas density and pressure measurements with a fast response time, or a transient temperature record.