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In a motorcycle gasoline engine, the port fuel injection system is rapidly spread. Compared to an automotive engine, the injected fuel does not impinge on the intake valve due to space restriction to install the injector. In addition, as the air flow inside the intake pipe may become very fast and has large cycle-to-cycle variation, it is not well found how the injector should be installed in the intake pipe to prepare “good” fuel-air mixture inside the intake pipe. In this study, the formation process of the fuel-air mixture is measured by using ILIDS system that is a 2-D droplets' size and velocity measurement system with high spatial resolution. Experiments with changing conditions such as flow speed and injection direction are carried out. As a result, the effects of injection direction, ambient flow speed and wall roughness on the fuel-air mixture formation process was examined, considering the three conditions of cold start, light to medium load operation and high load operation.

The introduction of real driving emissions cycles and increasingly restrictive emissions regulations force the automotive industry to develop new and more efficient solutions for emission reductions. In particular, the cold start and catalyst heating conditions are crucial for modern cars because is when most of the emissions are produced. One interesting strategy to reduce the time required for catalyst heating is post-oxidation. It consists in operating the engine with a rich in-cylinder mixture and completing the oxidation of fuel inside the exhaust manifold. The result is an increase in temperature and enthalpy of the gases in the exhaust, therefore heating the three-way-catalyst. The following investigation focuses on the implementation of post-oxidation by means of scavenging in a four-cylinder, turbocharged, direct injection spark ignition engine. The investigation is based on detailed measurements that are carried out at the test-bench.

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.

A direct injection gasoline engine system which employs a unique combustion system with enhanced gas motion is evaluated. Enhanced gas motion is produced by employing both a moderately strong swirl flow and a cavity in the piston. Advantages of this system are that the injection timing or spark timing need not be controlled severely and that since the injection timing can be set at near the intake BDC, time for evaporation can be gained to reduce soot emissions. Problems to be improved are that the Nox emissions level is worse than other lean burn systems and full load operation is not evaluated. According to the numerical calculations, the problems may be solved by enhancing the in-cylinder gas motion with axial stratification of swirl intensity at intake BDC; strong swirl near the cylinder head and weak swirl near the piston surface.

In this study, the characteristics of diesel spray droplets, such as the velocity and the diameter were simultaneously measured by using an improved ILIDS (Interferometric Laser Imaging for Droplet Sizing) method on a 2D plane to evaluate the droplet breakup modeling. In numerical analysis, DDM (Discrete Droplet Model) was employed with sub-models such as droplet breakup, droplet drag force and turbulence. Experiments have been performed with an accumulator type unit-injector system and a constant-volume high-pressure vessel under the condition of quiescent ambient gas. The injection pressure and ambient gas pressure were set up to 100 MPa and 0.1 / 1 MPa, respectively. The nozzle orifice diameter was 0.244 mm with a single hole. The measurement region was chosen at 40 ∼ 60 mm from the nozzle-tip. Numerical analysis of diesel sprays was conducted and the results were compared to the measured results.

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.

In order to measure the spatial distribution of fuel jet concentration quantitatively, a technique combining methods of fluorescence with absorption was developed. LIF method can obtain the spatial fuel distribution qualitatively, but quantitative measurement is difficult. Meanwhile, laser-beam absorption method can quantitatively obtain the integrated jet concentration on the light-path. In addition, scanning the laser-beam allows for a quasi 2-D quantitative measurement of the jet concentration. Firstly, in this study, this measurement system was tested in a homogeneously charged field while varying the dopant NO2 concentration, the laser-beam scanning speed, and the ambient pressure. As a result, some data-correction techniques were developed to produce a quantitative measurement. Secondly, this system was applied to gaseous jet fields in a constant volume bomb.

The authors have been engaged in developing a new-generation two-stroke gasoline engine which could be employed ultimately for automobiles. By investigating the defects of the Schnurle-type two-stroke gasoline engine, a reverse uniflow-type direct injection engine has been developed and built. The newly introduced system employs stratified charge combustion in light to medium load conditions by using the technology already developed for the four-stroke direct injection gasoline engines while it can supply the maximum power output by using a super-charger and attaining homogeneous combustion. Engine performance is being tested experimentally. In order to analyze the performance test results, numerical analysis of in-cylinder phenomena, such as gas-exchange, gas motion, fuel spray formation, and mixture formation is carried out in this paper.

The effects of injector deposits, combustion chamber deposits (CCD), and intake valve deposits (IVD) on exhaust emissions, fuel economy and engine performance have long been recognized in engine and fuel/detergent design. Because important elements of the engine design such as injector position, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) ratio, and air fuel ratio (AFR) differ from those in port fuel injection (PFI) engines, direct injection spark-ignition (DISI) engines require specific evaluation methods. However, little data is available regarding engine deposits in the more recently produced DISI engines.

To clarify the fuel spray formation process for a swirl-type injector, numerical analyses using both VOF (Volume Of Fluid) model and DDM (Discrete Droplet Model) method are carried out. VOF model is used to simulate the two-phase flow inside the injector and also the liquid film formation process outside the nozzle, while DDM is used to simulate a free fuel spray in a constant-volume chamber using initial conditions deduced by empirical equations or calculated results of VOF model. As a result, fairly good agreement of spray characteristics, such as the spray shape and the tip penetration between the experiment and calculation can be obtained by adopting initial conditions calculated by VOF model. However, improvements of droplet breakup models and of two-phase flow calculation method would be required to achieve quantitatively good agreement.

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.

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.

A model combustion chamber of Wankel type rotary engine was employed to study the DISC RE system. A two-stroke Diesel engine's cylinder head was replaced with this combustion chamber to simulate temporal change of air flow and pressure fields inside the chamber as an actual engine. The base engine was motorized to operate as a continuous rapid compression and expansion machine. Pilot fuel spray was injected onto a glow plug to form a pilot flame and it ignites the main fuel spray. The ignitability of pilot fuel, mixture formation process, ignition process of main fuel by pilot flame and the effect of pilot and main injection timings on combustion characteristics were examined.

A new idea for controlling the in-cylinder mixture formation in SI engines is proposed. This concept was developed by applying the results of numerical calculations. Fuel that is directly injected into the cylinder is transferred toward the cylinder head to form a mixture stratification by using the in-cylinder gas motion that is generated by the interaction between the swirl and squish flows inside a combustion chamber. At first, the flow characteristics were measured in the whole in-cylinder space using an LDV system. Also, numerical calculations of the in-cylinder flow were made using measured data as the initial conditions. Secondly, the local equivalence ratio at several points inside the combustion chamber was measured by using a fast gas sampling device.

In order to enhance the reliability of a pilot flame ignition system, three kinds of subchambers in which a pilot injector and a glow plug were set up were tested with a model combustion chamber of DISC rotary engine. A two-stroke Diesel engine's cylinder head was replaced with this model combustion chamber to simulate temporal changes of air flow and pressure fields inside the chamber as an actual engine. The behavior of the pilot flame generated in the subchamber, ignition process of main fuel spray by the pilot flame, the most suitable mixture distribution between the main chamber and the subchamber, and the effect of nozzle diameter of main injector on combustion characteristics were studied by using a high-speed video camera and ion probes.

A swirl-type injector is commonly used for the gasoline direct injection IC engines. To control and optimize the engine combustion, analyses of mixture formation process inside the cylinder are quite important. In this study, an evaluation of a DDM (Discrete Droplet Model) including breakup and evaporation sub-models has been made by making comparisons between the calculation and measurement. In the calculation, two kinds of initial conditions were tested; one was from empirical expressions and the other was from calculated results using a VOF (Volume Of Fluid) model that had a feature to examine the free fluid surface of a liquid fuel spray. As a result, the authors have found that a DDM can basically explain the spray formation process. However, much further modification of the breakup model and initial conditions would be required to have a quantitatively good agreement between the calculation and measurement

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 by low temperature plasma ignition while a voltage drop during discharge, leading to the transition to arc discharge, was found. In this study, the structure of plug and power supply’s performance with steep voltage rising with time, dV/dt, are examined to investigate the effects on combustion performance. As a result, comparing three power sources of conventional, IES and steep dV/dt, steep dV/dt showed small cycle-to-cycle variation and shorter combustion period, leading to higher peak value of the rate of heat release and better indicated thermal efficiency by relatively 6% and 4% compared to CIC and IES, respectively.

The purpose of this paper is to find a way to extend the high load limit of homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) combustion. This paper presents the effect of in-cylinder flow and stratified mixture on HCCI combustion by experiments and three-dimensional computer fluid dynamics coupled with a detailed chemical reaction calculation. The first study was conducted using a rapid compression and expansion machine (RCEM) equipped with a flow generation plate to create in-cylinder turbulent flow and with a control unit of in-cylinder wall temperature to create in-cylinder temperature distribution. The study assesses the effect of the turbulent flow and the temperature distribution on HCCI combustion. In the second study, the numerical simulation of HCCI combustion was conducted using large eddy simulation coupled with a detailed chemical reaction calculation. The study analyzes the interaction between in-cylinder turbulent flow and mixture distribution and HCCI combustion.

Resistive particulate matter sensor (PMS) is a promising solution for the diagnosis of diesel/gasoline particulate filter (DPF/GPF) functionality. Frequently triggered regeneration of their sensing element, for cleaning the soot dendrites deposited on the surface, leads to experience high temperature and thermal stress and pose high risk of developing cracks in the electrodes or sensing substrate. A semiconductor with a dopant concentration of 100 ppm~10000 ppm is applied as a sensing element for PMS self-diagnosis. Upon cooling at air, the polarization doped-insulating layer in a resistive PMS starts to resume the electrical conductivity in the wake of experiencing high regeneration temperature, through the electron and hole directional mobility.

The effect of properties of lubricating oil on low speed pre-ignition (LSPI) was investigated. Three different factors of oil properties such as cetane number, distillation characteristics and Calcium (Ca) additive (with and without) are prepared and examined. Then actual engine test of LSPI was carried out to evaluate the effect and to clarify the mechanism and role of lubricating oil. Finally it is clarified that the oil cetane number and/or Ca additive strongly affect LSPI phenomena.