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The gasoline direct injection engine starts significantly faster than a conventional engine. Fuel can be injected into the cylinder during the compression stroke at the same time of cranking start. When the spark plug ignites the mixture at the end of compression stroke, the engine has its first combustion, that is, the first combustion occurs within 0.2 sec after the start of cranking. This unique characteristic of quick startability has realized a idle stop system, which enables drivers to operate the vehicle in a natural manner.

Flow and flame structure visualization and modeling were performed to clarify the characteristics of bulk flow, turbulence and mixing in a four-valve engine to adopt the lean combustion concept named “Barrel-Stratification” to the larger displacement center-spark four-valve engine. It was found that the partitions provided in the intake port and the tumble-control piston with a curved-top configuration were effective to enhance the lean combustion of such an engine. By these methods, the fuel distribution in the intake port and the in-cylinder bulk flow structure are optimized, so that the relatively rich mixture zone is arranged around the spark plug. The tumble-control piston also contributes to optimize the flow field structure after the distortion of tumble and to enable stable lean combustion.

The major problems of the various mixture formation concepts for direct injection gasoline engines that have been proposed up to the present were caused by the difficulties of preparing the mixture with adequate strength at spark plug in wide range of engine operating conditions. Novel combustion control technologies proposed by Mitsubishi is one of the solution for these problems. By adopting upright straight intake ports to generate air tumble, an electromagnetic swirl injector to realize optimized spray dispersion and atomization and a compact piston cavity to maintain charge stratification, it has become possible to achieve super-lean stratified combustion for higher thermal efficiency under partial loads as well as homogeneous combustion to realize higher performance at full loads. GDI™ (Gasoline Direct Injection) engine adopting these technologies is developed. At partial loads, fuel economy improvement exceeding 30 % is realized.

Periodic oscillations of the speed of SI engine with MPI system at idle observed in the steady state and in the converging process after the inditial increase of load were investigated. These non-steady phenomena are the self-excitations of the closed-loop system induced by the lag factors inherent to the system such as the manifold charging delay and the fuel metering and transport lag and by the nonlinear factors such as the sensitivity of the torque to the equivalence ratio. But, even in the cases where the lags and the nonlinearity are insufficient, continuous oscillations with large amplitude are observed in the actual engine. They can be explained by introducing the concept of external perturbation induced by the combustion fluctuation. Disturbance prevents the phase lag in the system from converging, resulting in the continuation of oscillation.