Particulate Emission Reduction by Fuel Injection Timing Optimization in a Gasoline Direct Injection Engine

Optimized fuel injection timings in internal combustion engines exhibit superior performance, combustion characteristics, and lower emissions. Particularly, particulate emissions from a gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines are highly dependent on fuel injection timings. GDI engines have emerged as a popular choice of power plants for automobiles among customers worldwide. They are preferred over multiple-port fuel injection (MPFI) engines in the transport sector because of their superior fuel economy and performance characteristics. The main objective of this study is to optimize a GDI engine for the lowest particulate emission at different fuel injection timings. GDI engine was investigated for particulate matter (PM) mass/particulate number (PN) emissions at five fuel injection timings (230, 250, 270, 290, and 310 deg bTDC), covering the entire envelope. Once the optimum fuel injection timing was determined, an engine exhaust particle sizer was used to measure the particle size-number distribution. Particulate samples from the engine were also collected on a filter paper for morphological investigations of particulates collected under optimized fuel injection timings. These experiments confirmed the importance and need to optimize the fuel injection timings at every engine operating point to reduce the PM/PN emissions from a GDI engine, which remains one of the biggest unresolved challenges to this technology.