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A variety of diagnostic techniques useful for the study of cold start phenomena are presented. Although the tools are demonstrated in a port fuel-injected engine, they are also suitable for direct-injection gasoline engines. A very useful technique, seemingly forgotten in the literature (and applicable to diesel engines as well), is the use of a short focal-length lens inside a Bowditch piston to expand the field-of-view. Rather than being limited by the clear aperture of the window in the piston, this technique permits the entire combustion chamber and the top section of the cylinder liner to be seen. Results using this technique are presented for the imaging of pool fires and laser-induced fluorescence of fuel films.

A recently developed spark plug equipped with fiber-optic flame-arrival detectors has been used to measure the motion and rate of growth of the early flame kernel. The cylinder pressure and gas velocity in the spark gap were measured simultaneously with the flame kernel measurements, permitting the data to be analyzed on a cycle-by-cycle basis to identify cause-and-effect correlations between the measured parameters. The data were obtained in a homogeneous-charge research engine that could be modified to produce three very different flow fields: (1) high swirl with high turbulence intensity, (2) tumble vortex with moderate turbulence intensity, and (3) negligible bulk motion with low turbulence intensity. The results presented show a moderate correlation between the combustion duration and the rate of growth of the flame kernel, but virtually no correlation with either the magnitude or direction of movement of the flame kernel away from the spark gap.