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Ethanol Direct Injection as an Enabler for Aggressive Engine Downsizing

MIT scientists are exploring the use of ethanol direct injection (DI) to support the use of small, highly turbocharged engines with substantially increased efficiency as a downsizing strategy to reduce fuel consumption and emissions.

The researchers project that ethanol DI could result in a part-load efficiency increase of 30% relative to conventional port-fueled injection engines. The proposed direct injection approach could thus potentially provide a more cost-effective alternative to current generation gasoline-electric hybrids and turbodiesels.

The foundation of the approach is the enhanced knock suppression resulting from such a use of ethanol, which could allow for more than a factor of two increase in manifold pressure relative to conventional, while also supporting an increase in compression ratio.

Knock refers to the autoiginition of unburned gas in the cylinder. There are a number of factors that contribute to knock, but two of the main ones are cylinder pressure, temperature and fuel octane.

Turbocharged boosting of an engine can contribute to engine efficiency, and thereby support the use of a smaller engine. The application of turbocharging, however, is limited by the occurrence of knock under higher cylinder pressures.

The ethanol direct-injection concept uses the high octane rating of ethanol coupled with the evaporative cooling from direct injection to support the higher-pressure, more efficient engines. For example, a 3.0-liter engine could potentially be replaced by an engine of about half its size, resulting in a 30% increase in fuel efficiency over a typical driving cycle, according to the researchers.

The ethanol direct injection system is controlled separately form the gasoline injection system, and the ethanol is stored in a separate tank. The gasoline system can continue to use conventional port-injection.

The ethanol injection is carried out so as to maximize evaporative cooling which occurs when it is directly injected into the engine cylinders. The resulting reduction in temperature of the fuel/air charge from the ethanol evaporative cooling is the major factor in enhancing the fuel octane rating and suppressing knock.

The concept would operate the engine with a wide range of ethanol consumption from a minimum of less than 5% up to 100%, A knock sensor would determine when ethanol is needed to prevent knock. During the brief periods of high torque operation, the fractions of up to 100% ethanol could be used. For much of the drive cycle, vehicles are operated at low torque and there is no need for the use of ethanol.

Only a small amount of ethanol—less than one gallon of ethanol for every twenty gallons of gasoline—may be required to achieve the large increase in efficiency.

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Comments

Mark A

Will this offset the lower energy density of ethanol compared to gasoline? My guess would be no.

Does anyone automaker currently offer direct injection, of gasoline, in any vehicle currently for sale?

Nick

This appears to be a theoretical study without any prototype being built as yet--at least that's what appears from skimming the paper. Looks like a creative and very practical approach to improving fuel economy significantly with off-the-shelf technology. I hope to see more about this.

Nick

Mark:

I don't think the lower energy density of ethanol is such an issues with this idea, since the engine would run on gasoline most of the time, adding ethanol when needed as an octane booster and knock inhibitor during hard acceleration, etc. You get a smaller gasoline engine running efficiently under part-load conditions (most of the time) and a high-boost turbo under load. You do have to fill up with two separate fuels, however.

Mark A

Thanks, I stand corrected. I misunderstood into thinking the engine was to be run on ethanol only, and not as an additive.

Cosmo

If GM is serious, I mean SERIOUS about producing flex-fuel vehicles, this technology, or one similar to it would be an excelent way to minimize one of the most significant disadvantages of ethanol - the lower energy density relative to gasoline. GM should really start to dole out some research dollars into technologies like this. Toyota and Honda has to invest heavily in hybrid technology to make them work, I expect GM will need to do the same for flex fuel vehicles as well.

W2

Mark,
"Does anyone automaker currently offer direct injection, of gasoline, in any vehicle currently for sale?"
Yes there are few of them: GM,VW, Mercedes. As a matter of fact my '91 Cadillac Seville had direct injection (I know because I had to replace those injectors few times)

gerald earl

MIT is now looking into creating an alternative energy research lab.I would encourage GM to offer a close working and funding relationship.
If this tech were scaled up and tested successfully it would leapfrog the patent holder ahead of hevs.This is one reason automakers are timid of plowing money into new tech.
I have been reading MIT Technology Review for years.Many stories I read about in the nineties are entering the market now.I believe an alternative energy reveloution is taking off .now

Angelo

GM is not using direct injection in any gasoline engines...yet. The Solstice GXP will be their first application this fall though. Audi/VW have done a great job with it in their 2.0 Turbo that is used in the A3, A4, Jetta, and Passat. Lexus uses it on 3 naturally aspirated engines so far - a 2.5 and a 3.5 in the IS and a 3.0 in the GS. Mercedes is also using it, and BMW will be in the fall as well.

However, to the best of my knowledge, none of them are using the most advanced super high pressure "micro piezo" versions yet (I believe Mercedes will in their upcoming BluTec Diesel). That is where the big gains in fuel efficiency will come from, because of the ability to run a very lean air-fuel mixture.

Nick

Since we're all giving advice to GM, I may as well join the party: GM, combine this technology with your inexpensive mild hybrid (BAS/Vue Greenline, etc) technology for a potentially much less costly solution compared to full hybrids that competes with them in both stop-and-go conditions and on the highway.

Sid Hoffman

Mazda is also using direct injection on their Mazdaspeed 3s, or whatever it's called. Honda uses direct injection on a version of the Stream minivan, although it has never been sold in the USA. DI is just about the last big thing for gasoline engines as far as increasing volumetric efficiency. After DI is commonplace, nearly all further gains will have to come from downsizing, forced induction, and hybridization.

Angelo

Maybe a little more complicated than you were thinking, but GM is taking a similar approach through Saab:

http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/03/saab_unveils_e1.html

30mpg on E100, on an AWD convertible (which is a good deal heavier than a sedan) with a 5-speed auto. A lighter FWD sedan with a CVT would add a few more MPG.

rj

Direct injection has nothing to do with volumetric efficiency.

Volumetric efficiency is a measure of how much air your engine pumped relative to it's displacement.
Air is the limiting reagent in the chemical reaction, more air lets you use more fuel = more power.
A higher volumetric efficiency lets you get more work out of an engine with smaller displacement.

variable valve timing/lift etc is a big thing for engines as far as increasing volumetric efficiency.

There are many times where you want to operate at less than 100% power ... so you throttle the engine with the carb/ throttle body but this increases pumping losses.

The BMW valve-tronic adjusts valve timing and lift and eliminates the throttle plate.

Because most vehicles have a fixed number of discrete gear ratios the engine has to operate over a range of speeds.

This is bad for efficency, the intake / exhaust manifolds cam shaft(s) that work great at 6000 rpm suck at idle.

This is why you see variable length intake manifolds and variable valve timing systems to try make the engine run well over a wide rpm range.

GM uses an exhaust cam that can be advanced or retarded, honda uses 2 camshafts one for high rpm and one for low rpm operation.

Chrysler, GM, and others use cylinder deactivation to reduce fuel consumption under low load.

DI + variable valve timing does allow you to do some cool things like stratified charge combustion.
Reading on this subject is left as an exersize to the reader.


Nick

ri:

Your cogent comments on throttling, pumping losses, etc. are not contrary to the thrust of this development. As I read the paper, DI is only used for ethanol; gasoline would still be port injected. The efficiency benefit is gained by running a smaller engine at wider-open throttle most of the time (part load), closer to it's efficient operating range. When you need more power, you increase manifold pressure (turbo) and meter in the ethanol through DI to eliminate preignition. It looks like most of the efficiency would be gained by the part-load optimization, if I'm not mistaken, not by DI.

Patrick

How sad that no one (in the USA) ever realizes that Mitsubishi was the first company to mass market a Gasoline Direct Injection powered vehicle. They had a 1.8L 4 cylinder GDI engine back in 97 being used in the Japan market Lancer. Now it is a 2.0L GDI and turbo 2.0L GDI engine in the Lancer. They use a 40:1 air fuel ratio thanks to GDI.

Many drag racers have used ethanol injection when they turbocharged naturally aspirated motors and did not want to put in lower compression pistons. Hyundai McIntyre in El Paso, TX (well it is owned by someone else now but back in the late 90s it was owned by McIntyre) used to spit out turbocharged vehicles with Ethanol injection to support the additional power. They would have 140hp 2.0L motors pushing 300hp with no intercooler on stock compression, stock internals (with a t3/4 hybrid garrett turbo) simply through the use of ethanol to cool the incoming air and provide fuel to support the extra power.

K

thanks to RI for sorting out a lot of terms people should just know if they talk about this subject.

i agree that stratified combustion is where some neat savings will be. i will be really startled if cam and valve tricks can go much further in helping mileage.

the old Otto cycle has given us a wonderful century of thrilling rides and, sometimes, fits when the mechanicals broke. the batteries and cell replacements are unlikely to be as much fun but alas, they are needed.


A.Syme

ADI (Anti-Detonation Injection) was used on the large piston aircraft engines from WW2 up to the 1950's. This looks like a sophisticated version of it, could work very well. I'm supprised we haven't seen something like this sooner.

Ruaraidh

RJ,

Unfortuntely you are wrong: GDI has a lot to do with volumetric efficiency, that's where a good chunk of it's benefits come from.

TO all above. A very large proportion of Euro market petrol (gasoline) cars are now available with GDI. I think you'll struggle to buy a VW without it in Europe!

So RJ:

To explain how injection method affects Voleff:

Injection into the cylinder directly creates two changes that affect voleff

1) The latent heat of evaporation of the fuel injected is now removed from the air in the cylinder rather than from the inlet port wall. This results in denser charge inthe cylinder which means that more air can be ingested on any given induction stroke. This directly increases vol eff.

2) The fuel vapour is no longer passing through the inlet valve. This means that the valve is free to flow air alone and thus more air can be flowed for a given valve size. This also directly increases airflow into the cylinder and thus vol eff.

Finally all the temperature benefits (cooler charge due to in-cylidner cooling from latent heat of evaporation of the fuel, which, incidentally is much greater for alcohol fuels than petrol) directly affect knock limit and thus improve the specific air consumption ie what we can do with our air in terms of power after we have got it through the engine.

Finally, you can improve knock limit by doing other clever things like double injections at high power eg homogenous lean injection during induction stroke (knock limit is a strong function of AFR) which reduces knocking stronly int he end gases and then just at the top of the compression stroke, add a second injection so that the overall fuelling is stoich if it were averaged. It's not however, it's lean with a stratified rich area which makes it very knock resistant around the edges of the chamber but richer around the plug so it's easy to initiate combustion.

There are lots of things you can do with GDI that you can't with port injection. I'm surprised that the US market doesn't have this much yet. With the aforementioned Mitsubishi, they've been around for nearly 10 years over here. The problem in the US market is the same as for diesels I think: tight US NOx regs coupled with very high sulphur content fuels means that lean AFR emissions conversion is impossible to acheive (sulphur damage).

You can run GDI at stoich but the big benefits come from running lean (with NOx traps and converters like a diesel)so that you save more fuel at part load and can still run more power at full load than a conventional port injection engine. Best of both worlds.

Cost is the big downside though.

Andrey

Everybody: welcome to performance DIY world. Some information for starters:
1) dual fuel injection is well-established practice to boost performance of existing engines. Usually it is intake manifold injection of methanol/water mix to improve volumetric efficiency, increase octane number, and provide full throttle rich-out. Ethanol, as inferior of methanol, is not usually used ( methanol, as being formerly produced from wood and bearing name of wood alcohol, currently is much more economically produced from NG; hence, not sexy enough for environmentalists). Sometimes this technique is used on stroked engines to allow use of regular gasoline with high-octane methanol/water injection on full throttle. On diesel engine close controlled methanol/water injection boost max torque/power by 30%.
2) Among scientific/engineer/journalist community it is common practice to claim that direct injection Ggasoline engine can boost fuel economy by 30%. It is a lie. The truth is that stratified charge direct injection gasoline working at substantially less then stoichiometric air/fuel ratio could achieve fuel efficiency gain up to 30%. This is exactly the case with outboard marine engines, because of much relaxed exhaust emission regulation. Unfortunately, for cars it is not the case. Three way catalytic converter could work only if exhaust is close to stoichiometric ratio. That means that gasoline direct injection engines, such as bravely sold by VW/Audi, could maintain only (or whopping?) 10% fuel efficiency gain.
3) Billions of dollars are invested recently to develop NOx adsorber cat converters, capable to work on lean air/fuel ratio. My bet that first commercial applications will be on the road in about a year. From that time on, expect 30% fuel efficiency gain for GDI engines and oblivion of diesel power for passenger vehicles.

Ruaraidh

Audrey:

You can certainly get 10% gains running at *stoich* with GDI through the mechanisms I have mentioned above. There is plenty of evidence of this from the Euro market if you care to look.

The 30% claim here is not related to running stoich.

NOx adsorber and lean reduction catalysts are already available in territories with low sulphur fuel eg Euro area is legally mandated to be <50ppm sulphur. Not US where it can be as high as 400ppm and varies by area across the country.

There is no need to say that less stringent emissions are required to run lean as vehicles do in Europe. A LEV2 car produces similar percentages of the respective legislative limits when run over a EuroIV cycle....

Rafael Seidl

Requiring consumers to maintain not one but two tanks of rapidly consumed liquids at sufficiently high levels represents a substantial barrier to market adoption. Witness the (otherwise unrelated) requirement for AdBlue in diesel engines with SCR systems. Setting up a production and continent-wide distribution infrastructure for a new fuel is also a daunting task.

Note also that in the proposed architecture, the high octane number of alcohols (ethanol, methanol) can only be exploited at very high boost ratios, since the geometric compression of the engine is limited by the gasoline that is normally burnt. Turbochargers that deliver high boost pressures are relatively large (= high lag) and only become effective near nominal load. However, all system components, from air filter to intercooler to crankcase, piston, crankshaft, valvetrain, manifolds, catalyst etc. also need to be adapted to this worst case mechanical and thermal load. This combination of downsides renders the proposal rather marginal IMHO.

The more sensible approach to radical downsizing gasoline engines is to combine the turbocharger with a mechanical compressor that is only used at low RPM (VW Golf GT) or, via hybridization. The latter is accomplished e.g. via electric assist to the turbocharger (Garett, Caterpillar diesels) and/or an integrated starter-generator (FEV study for Audi). In NA engines, a small turbogenerator may be fitted in a bypass of the exhaust manifold to power various pumps and the a/c without recourse to shaft power.

Throttling losses can be reduced using variable lift valvetrains on the intake side (BMW, Porsche, Honda, Toyota, ...). A related / competing concept for large engines is displacement-on-demand a.k.a. cylinder deactivation (Honda, GM).

As for GDI, only the second-generation spray-guided systems have significant impact on fuel economy. This is partly because they raise the knock limit via evaporative cooling but mostly because they permit stable ignition of a highly stratified mix with global lambda >> 2 in part load. In homogenous mode, lambda ~1.6 is the limit for gasoline ignition. With CNG, especially if it is blended with a small fraction of hydrogen, the ignition limit for a homogenous mixture is lambda > 2.

However, all of these lean-burn concepts require fairly expensive NOx aftertreatment (cp. diesel) to meet emission regs, or else HCCI (still stuck in the lab).

Joe Padula

My idea is a Serial Plug in Hybrid. All of the power for the wheels comes from an electric motor. The battery pack is kept charged by a flexfuel turbocharged direct injection gas engine, without a throttle plate, run at one most efficient speed or it will be turned off. Of course it can be plugged in so the grid can be used to charge the battery.
It is a like RAV-4 or EV-1 pure battery car with a smaller 30 mile range battery except an engine sized for average power not peak power or torque. The wieght saved by downsizing the battery is used for the engine and fuel. The turbo allows for a smaller engine but the high boost turbo lag is no problem since the engine runs at constant speed and limited load variation. No tricks with valve timimg, though of course modern DI injection methods are used.
A diesel can be used also as soon as they meet PZEV emissions...
This is the simplest system in many ways.

Ruaraidh

You don't really have to have two tanks. By ignoring port injection altogether, you could quite easily end up with a GDI FFV which would run from normal petrol to alcohol eg E85.

The conceptual advantages of direct injection alcohol are still valid. Having a duplicated injection system with different fuels is highly unlikely to work in-market and froma cost POV having duplicated injection hardware is also pretty uneccessarily profligate!

rj

Dual injection systems are already being done.
Both with 2 sets of port injectors (has been done on corvets) and DI + port.

http://www.autoblog.com/2006/02/22/high-end-v6s-the-lexus-direct-injection-3-5l-and-cadillac-3-6l/

Ruaraidh

Yes I know they are but not with differing fuels for each system.

Dual systems are still a very expensive for the benefits they actually create when pure DI can be done easily. See Euro VW range... If you do DI properly, you don't need PFI....

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