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Diesel-like combustion of an emulsified blend of water and diesel fuel in a constant volume chamber vessel was visualized with high speed color video, further analyzing with a 2-D two color method and shadowgraph images. When the temperature at the fuel injection is 900 K, here while the combustion with unblended diesel fuel in the vessel is similar to ordinary diesel combustion with diffusive combustion, combustion with the emulsified fuel is similar to premixed diesel combustion with a large premixed combustion and very little diffusive combustion. With the emulsified fuel the flame luminosity and temperature are lower, the luminous flame and high temperature regions are smaller, and the duration of the luminous flame is shorter than with diesel fuel. This is due to promotion of premixing with increases in the ignition delay and decreases in the combustion temperature with the water vaporization.

Gasoline Compression Ignition (GCI) has been identified as a technology which could give both high efficiency and relatively low engine-out emissions. The introduction of any new vehicle technology requires widespread availability of appropriate fuels. It would be ideal therefore if GCI vehicles were able to operate using the standard grade of gasoline that is available at the pump. However, in spite of recent progress, operation at idle and low loads still remains a formidable challenge, given the relatively low autoignition reactivity of conventional gasoline at these conditions. One conceivable solution would be to use both diesel and gasoline, either in separate tanks or blended as a single fuel (“dieseline”). However, with this latter option, a major concern for dieseline would be whether a flammable mixture could exist in the vapour space in the fuel tank.

Octane appetite of modern engines has changed as engine designs have evolved to meet performance, emissions, fuel economy and other demands. The octane appetite of seven modern vehicles was studied in accordance with the octane index equation OI=RON-KS, where K is an operating condition specific constant and S is the fuel sensitivity (RONMON). Engines with a displacement of 2.0L and below and different combinations of boosting, fuel injection, and compression ratios were tested using a decorrelated RONMON matrix of eight fuels. Power and acceleration performance were used to determine the K values for corresponding operating points. Previous studies have shown that vehicles manufactured up to 20 years ago mostly exhibited negative K values and the fuels with higher RON and higher sensitivity tended to perform better.

Combustion in direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engines is strongly influenced by the in-cylinder charge motion. The charge motion depends both on the injection strategy as well as the geometry of the combustion chamber/air intake system and the physical location of the injectors (side mounted vs. centrally mounted). For boosted and downsized DISI engines, many manufacturers are favouring a single late injection or a split injection strategy. This has the advantage of creating high levels of turbulence which leads to faster combustion and improved thermodynamic efficiency. Furthermore the charge cooling offers enhanced knock resistance, thereby allowing more spark advance. The calibration of such engines is critical: the prize of greater thermodynamic efficiency must be balanced against the risks of charge inhomogeneity, namely excessive particulate emissions and poor drivability.

Ultra low emissions and high performance combustion was achieved with a combination of high EGR, a three-way catalyst, and a highly oxygenated liquid fuel, neat dimethoxy methane (DMM), in an ordinary DI diesel engine. The smokeless nature of neat DMM effectively allowed stoichiometric diesel combustion by controlling BMEP with EGR. NOx, THC, and CO emissions were reduced with a three-way catalyst. At lower BMEP with excess air, the EGR effectively reduced NOx. High-speed video in a bottom view type engine revealed that luminous flame decreased with increased fuel oxygen content and almost disappeared with DMM.

Significant improvements in exhaust emissions and engine performance in an ordinary DI diesel engine were realized with highly oxygenated fuels. The smoke emissions decreased sharply and linearly with increases in oxygen content and entirely disappeared at an oxygen content of 38 wt-% even at stoichiometric conditions. The NOx, THC, and CO were almost all removed with a three-way catalyst under stoichiometric diesel combustion at both the higher and lower BMEP with the combination of EGR and a three-way catalyst. The engine output for the highly oxygenated fuels was significantly higher than that with the conventional diesel fuel due to the higher air utilization.

The authors have reported significant smoke reduction in twin shaped semi-premixed diesel combustion with a newly designed combustion chamber to distribute the first and the second sprays into upper and lower layers. However, the first stage premixed combustion tends to advance far from the TDC, resulting in lowering of thermal efficiencies. In this report, improvement of thermal efficiency by optimizing the combustion phase with lower ignitability fuels was identified with the divided combustion chamber. The experiment was conducted with four fuels with different cetane numbers. The first stage premixed combustion can be retarded to the optimum phase with the fuel with cetane number 38, establishing high efficiencies.

Diesel soot suppression effects of catalytic fuel additives for a range of fuels with different properties were investigated with calcium naphthenate. A single cylinder DI diesel engine and a thermobalance were used to determine the soot reduction and its mechanism for seven kinds of fuels. Experimental results showed that the catalytic effect of the fuel additive was different for the different fuels, and could be described by a parameter considering cetane number and kinematic viscosity. The fuel additives reduced soot more effectively for fuels with higher cetane number and lower kinematic viscosity. This result was explained by soot oxidation characteristics for the different fuels. Oxidation of soot with the metallic additive proceeds in two stages: stage I, a very rapid oxidation stage; and stage II, a following slow or ordinary oxidation stage.

Diesel emissions are significant issue worldwide, and emissions requirements have become so tough that. the application of after-treatment systems is now indispensable in many countries To meet even more stringent future emissions requirements, it has become apparent that the improvement of market fuel quality is essential as well as the development in engine and exhaust after-treatment technology. Japan Clean Air Program II (JCAP II) is being conducted to assess the direction of future technologies through the evaluation of current automobile and fuel technologies and consequently to realize near zero emissions and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction. In this program, effects of fuel properties on the performance of diesel engines and a vehicle equipped with two types of diesel NOx emission after-treatment devices, a Urea-SCR system and a NOx storage reduction (NSR) catalyst system, were examined.

Synthetic fuels (e-fuels) synthesized from H2 and CO by renewable electricity are expected as the next- generation diesel fuels and two types of e-fuels have received extensive attention: Fischer-Tropsch (FT) fuel and Oxymethylene dimethyl ether (OME). In this study the effects of OME blending ratios with 0 to 50 vol.% in FT fuels on combustion, emissions and spray characteristics in diesel engines are investigated. The results suggest that the OME blends to FT fuels suppressed the deterioration in combustion efficiency under low intake oxygen concentration conditions. The smoke emissions of FT fuels and OME blended fuels were both lower than those of diesel fuel and decreased with the increase in the OME blend ratio, and the soot-NOx trade-off relation in diesel engines can be improved.

In Biodiesel Fuel Research Working Group(WG) of Japan Auto-Oil Program(JATOP), some impacts of high biodiesel blends have been investigated from the viewpoints of fuel properties, stability, emissions, exhaust aftertreatment systems, cold driveability, mixing in engine oils, durability/reliability and so on. This report is designed to determine how high biodiesel blends affect oil quality through testing on 2005 regulations engines with DPFs. When blends of 10-20% rapeseed methyl ester (RME) with diesel fuel are employed with 10W-30 engine oil, the oil change interval is reduced to about a half due to a drop in oil pressure. The oil pressure drop occurs because of the reduced kinematic viscosity of engine oil, which resulting from dilution of poorly evaporated RME with engine oil and its accumulation, however, leading to increased wear of piston top rings and cylinder liners.

Diesel combustion and emissions with four kinds of oxygenated agents as main fuels were investigated. Significant improvements in smoke, particulate matter, NOx, THC, and thermal efficiency were simultaneously realized with the oxygenates, and engine noise was also remarkably reduced for the oxygenates with higher ignitability. The improvements in the exhaust emissions and the thermal efficiency depended almost entirely on the oxygen content in the fuels regardless of the oxygenate to diesel fuel blend ratios and type of oxygenate. The unburned THC emission and odor intensity under starting condition with an oxygenate were also much lower than with conventional diesel fuel.

The effects of lubricant oil and fuel properties on low speed pre-ignition (LSPI) occurrence in boosted S.I. engines were experimentally evaluated with multi-cylinder engine and de-correlated oil and fuel matrices. Further, the auto-ignitability of fuel spray droplets and evaporated homogeneous fuel/oil mixtures were evaluated in a combustion bomb and pressure differential scanning calorimetry (PDSC) tests to analyze the fundamental ignition process. The work investigated the effect of engine conditions, fuel volatility and various lubricant additives on LSPI occurrence. The results support the validity of aspects of the LSPI mechanism hypothesis based on the phenomenon of droplets of lubricant oil/fuel mixture (caused by adhesion of fuel spray on the liner wall) flying into the chamber and autoigniting before spark ignition.

The engine performance and the exhaust gas emissions in a dual fuel compression ignition engine with natural gas as the main fuel and a small quantity of pilot injection of diesel fuel with the ultra-high injection pressure of 250 MPa as an ignition source were investigated at 0.3 MPa and 0.8 MPa IMEP. With increasing injection pressure the unburned loss decreases and the thermal efficiency improves at both IMEP conditions. At the 0.3 MPa IMEP the THC and CO emissions are significantly reduced when maintaining the equivalence ratio of natural gas with decreasing the volumetric efficiency by intake gas throttling, but the NOx emissions increase and excessive intake gas throttling results in a decrease in the indicated thermal efficiency. Under the 250 MPa pilot injection condition simultaneous reductions in the NOx, THC, and CO emissions can be established with maintaining the equivalence ratio of natural gas by intake gas throttling.

Stringent regulations on fuel economy have driven major innovative changes in the internal combustion engine design. (E.g. CAFE fuel economy standards of 54.5 mpg by 2025 in the U.S) Vehicle manufacturers have implemented engine infrastructure changes such as downsizing, direct injection, higher compression ratios and turbo-charging/super-charging to achieve higher engine efficiencies. Fuel properties therefore, have to align with these engine changes in order to fully exploit the possible benefits. Fuel octane number is a key metric that enables high fuel efficiency in an engine. Greater resistance to auto-ignition (knock) of the fuel/air mixture allows engines to be operated at a higher compression ratio for a given quantity of intake charge without severely retarding the spark timing resulting in a greater torque per mass of fuel burnt. This attribute makes a high octane fuel a favorable hydrocarbon choice for modern high efficiency engines that aim for higher fuel economy.

In light of increasingly stringent CO2 emission targets, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) have been driven to develop engines which deliver improved combustion efficiency and reduce energy losses. In spark ignition engines one strategy which can be used to reach this goal is the full utilization of fuel octane number. Octane number is the fuel´s knock resistance and is characterized as research octane number (RON) and motor octane number (MON). Engine knock is caused by the undesired self-ignition of the fuel air mixture ahead of the flame front initiated by the spark. It leads to pressure fluctuations that can severely damage the engine. Modern vehicles utilize different strategies to avoid knock. One extreme strategy assumes a weak fuel quality and, to protect the engine, retards the spark timing at the expense of combustion efficiency. The other extreme carefully detects knock in every engine cycle and retards the spark timing only when knock is detected.

Market demand for high performance gasoline vehicles and increasingly strict government emissions regulations are driving the development of highly downsized, boosted direct injection engines. The in-cylinder temperatures and pressures of these emerging technologies tend to no longer adhere to the test conditions defining the RON and MON octane rating scales. This divergence between fuel knock rating methods and fuel performance in modern engines has previously led to the development of an engine and operating condition dependent scaling factor, K, which allows for extrapolation of RON and MON values. Downsized, boosted DISI engines have been generally shown to have negative K-values when knock limited, indicating a preference for fuels of higher sensitivity and challenging the relevance of a lower limit to the MON specification.

Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence has been widely accepted and applied to measurements of fuel concentration distributions in IC engines. The need for such measurements has increased with the introduction of Direct Injection (DI) gasoline engines, where it is critical to understand the influence of mixture inhomogeneity on ignition and subsequent combustion, and in particular the implications for cyclic variability. The apparent simplicity of PLIF has led to misunderstanding of the technique when applied to quantitative measurements of fuel distributions. This paper presents a series of engineering methods for optimizing, calibrating and referencing, which together demonstrate a quantitative measure of fuel concentration with an absolute accuracy of 10%. PLIF is widely used with single component fuels as carriers for the fluorescent tracers.

Palm oil has the important advantage of productivity compared to other vegetable oils such as rapeseed oil and soybean oil. However, the cold flow performance of palm oil methyl ester (PME) is poorer than other vegetable oil based biodiesel fuels. Previous research by the authors has shown that ethanol blending into PME improves the cold flow performance and considerably reduces smoke emission. The reduced smoke may be expected to allow an expansion in the EGR limit and lead to reduced NOx. This paper experimentally analyses the influence of EGR on smoke and NOx emissions from the diesel combustion with PME/ethanol blended fuel. The mechanisms in the smoke reduction are also analyzed.

In recent years, boosted and downsized engines have gained much attention as a promising technology to improve fuel economy; however, knocking is a common issue of such engines that requires attention. To understand the knocking phenomenon under downsized and boosted engine conditions deeply, fuels with different Research Octane Number (RON) and Motor Octane Number (MON) were prepared, and the knocking performances of these fuels were evaluated using a single cylinder engine, operated under a variety of conditions. Experimental results showed that the knocking performance at boosted conditions depend on both RON and MON. While higher RON showed better anti-knocking performance, lower MON showed better anti-knocking performance. Furthermore, the tendency for a reduced MON to be beneficial became stronger at lower engine speeds and higher boost pressures, in agreement with previously published modelling work.