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This paper describes simultaneous attainment in improving fuel consumption, output power and reducing HC emissions with a direct injection S.I. engine newly developed in Nissan. Straight intake port is adopted to increase discharge coefficient under WOT operation and horizontal swirl flow is generated by a swirl control valve to provide stable stratified charge combustion under part load conditions. As a result, fuel consumption is reduced by more than 20% and power output is improved by approximately 10%. Moreover, unburned HC is reduced by equivalently 30% in engine cold start condition. An application of diagnostic and numerical simulation tools to investigate and optimize various factors are also introduced.

The spray formation and mixing processes in a direct-injection gasoline engine are examined by using a sophisticated air flow calculation model and an original spray model. The spray model for a spiral injector can evaluate the droplet size and spatial distribution under a wide range of parameters such as the initial cone angle, back pressure and injection pressure. This model also includes the droplet breakup process due to wall impingement. The arbitrary constants used in the spray model are derived theoretically without using any experimental data. Fuel vapor distributions just before ignition and combustion processes are analyzed for both homogeneous and stratified charge conditions.

A new numerical simulation system has been developed which predicts flow behavior of fuel film formed on intake port and combustion chamber walls of gasoline engines. The system consists of a film flow model employing film thickness as a dependent variable, an air flow model, and a fuel spray model. The system can analyze fuel film flow formed on any arbitrary three-dimensional configuration. Fuel film flow formed under a condition of continuous intermittent fuel injection and steady-state air flow was calculated, and comparison with experimental data showed the system possessing ability of qualitative prediction.

Coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy (CARS) temperature measurements were performed in the unburned gas in a spark ignition engine. First, as the residual gas mass fraction is one of the factor that is known to cause to autoignition, the effect of the residual gas mass fraction on the unburned gas temperature is estimated. In order to control the residual gas mass fraction, a skip fired cycle method was used., and the single cylinder test engine used in this study was fueled with gasoline (89.9 RON). The residual gas causes the unburned gas temperature to rise by approximately 55 K and it also produces a large temperature variation on the order of ±20 K when expressed as a standard deviation. Second, the unburned gas temperature of the single cylinder test engine and the 4 valve production engine was measured under steady-state engine operation in order to compare the residual gas mass fraction of the test engine with that of the production engine.

Combinations of swirl flow and tumble flow generated by 13 types of swirl control valve were tested by using both impulse steady flow rig and LDV. Comparison between the steady flow characteristics and the result of LDV measurement under motoring condition shows that tumble flow generates turbulence in combustion chamber more effectively than swirl flow does, and that swirling motion reduces the cycle by cycle variation of mean velocity in combustion chamber which tends to be generated by tumbling motion. Performance tests are also carried out under the condition of homogeneous charge. Tumble flow promotes the combustion speed more strongly than expected from its turbulence intensity measured by LDV. It is also shown that lean limit air fuel ratio does not have a strong relation with cycle variation of mean velocity but with turbulence intensity.

Laser induced fluorescence (LIF) is a useful method for visualizing the distribution of the air-fuel ratio in the combustion chamber. The way this method is applied mainly depends on the fluorescent tracer used, such as biacetyl, toluene, various aldehydes, fluoranthene or diethylketone, among others. Gasoline strongly absorbs light in the UV region, for example, at the 248-nm wavelength of broadband KrF excimer laser radiation. Therefore, when using this type of laser, iso-octane is employed as the fuel because it is transparent to 248-nm UV light. However, since the distillation curves of iso-octane and gasoline are different, it can be expected that their vaporization characteristics in the intake port and cylinder would also be different. The aim of this study was to find a better fuel for use with LIF at a broadband wavelength of 248 nm. Three tasks were undertaken in this study.

Flow measurement by laser Doppler velocimetry and visualization of in-cylinder fuel vapor motion by laser induced fluorescence were performed for various types of intake systems that generated several different combinations of swirl and tumble ratios. The measured results indicate that certain swirl and tumble ratios are needed to achieve charge stratification in the cylinder. Performance tests were also carried out to determine the combustion characteristics of each intake system. Then, the features of combustion when the charge stratification was realized was analyzed.

In order to study the potentiality of the modification of the combustion rate for NOx formation control in the spark ignition (SI) engine, the authors first developed a new mathematical model by assuming the stepped gas temperature gradient in the cylinder. The predicted results from this new mathematical model show good coincidence with the experimental data. Second, the authors discuss the effects of the modification of the combustion rate on NOx formation using the new mathematical model. It was concluded that NOx formation in the premixed SI engine would be essentially determined by the specific fuel consumption only, regardless of any modification of the engine combustion rate.

Since a 4-valve engine is less flexible in the design and location of the intake ports as compared with a conventional 2-valve engine, there are some difficulties in strengthening the air motion, including swirl and turbulence, in order to achieve stable combustion under lean mixture operation. This study examined air motion imporvements of 4-valve engine that result in a stable combustion with a lean mixture. These improvements are brought about by the installation of a swirl control valve in each intake port. The results of this study have clarified that the lean stable limit was extended from an air-fuel ratio of 21.5 to 26.3 under a partial load, by optimizing the location and diameter of aperture of the swirl control valve.

An analysis of the factors that limit the improvement in thermal efficiency at higher compression ratios was performed with both thermodynamic calculation and experiment. The results showed that the major factors were cooling loss and unburned fuel. Both of these factors increase with smaller swept volume, larger S/V ratio combustion chamber, and lower engine speed and load. These effects explain the observation that thermal efficiency peaks at relatively low compression ratio.

In previous multi-dimensional modeling on spray dynamics and vapor formation, single component fuel with pure substance has been analyzed to assess the mixture formation. Then it should be expected that the evaporation process could be performed for the multicomponent fuel such as actual Gasoline and Diesel gas oil. In this study, vapor-liquid equilibrium prediction was conducted for multicomponent fuels such as 3 and 10 components mixed solution with ideal solution analysis and non-ideal solution analysis. And the computation of distillation characteristics was conducted for the steady state fuel condition fuel condition to understand the evaporation process. As a result, calculated distillation characteristics are consistent well with experiment results. And the evaporation process of a multicomponent droplet in the combustion chamber has been calculated with the variation of ambient pressure and temperature.

This paper presents a study of mixture formation in the combustion chamber of a direct-injection SI engine. In-cylinder flow measurement was conducted using laser Doppler velocimetry (LDV) and particle image velocimetry (PIV), and visualization of fuel vapor behavior was done using laser-induced fluorescence (LIF). Further, fast response flame ionization detector (FID) was used to measure the hydrocarbon (HC) concentrations in the vicinity of the spark plug. Thereby mixture concentrations in the vicinity of the spark plug, within the mixture distribution observed using LIF, were quantified. Results revealed that an upward flow forms near the center of the cylinder in the latter half of the compression stroke and goes from the piston crown toward the cylinder head. This upward flow is caused by the synergistic effect of the swirl motion generated in the cylinder and the cylindrical bowl provided in the piston crown eccentrically to the central axis of the cylinder.

One of advanced requirements in current high output power engine design, as is seen in a four valve engine, is to reduce the exhaust noise without a reduction in engine performance. In order to examine the relationship between output and exhaust noise level, a gas dynamics simulation model was extended so as to predict the exhaust generated noise. The gas dynamics model used in this study is developed based on a finite difference method in which unsteady compressible flow is solved by two-step Lax-Wendroff method. Using this simulation model, timing changes were found to be effective in reducing the exhaust noise level without showing any trade-off on engine performance. These results were validated by the experiment.