Description / Abstract:
Preface
Since the birth of internal combustion (IC) engines more than
100 years ago, engine technology has made tremendous progress in
terms of efficiency and reliability. In the last two decades, the
environmental implications of engine exhaust emissions have
resulted in greater effort in reducing harmful pollutants to meet
ever-stringent legislation. Increased knowledge and understanding
of the combustion and pollutant formation processes in IC engines
are clearly necessary to increase their efficiency and cleanliness,
and to evolve and invent new engines with increased efficiency and
lower emissions. The traditional engineering approach has been
mostly to treat the engine combustion chamber as a black box and
make measurements in the inlet and the exhaust systems. As the
processes of improvement in efficiency and emission abatement have
reached points of diminishing returns, there is an increasing need
for measurements directly inside the combustion chamber, where the
combustion and pollutant formation processes actually take place.
Therefore, this book is particularly concerned with diagnostic
techniques for in-cylinder measurements. The equipment used for
exhaust gas measurements are only briefly discussed since these are
well established, and they are readily available commercially.
Owing to the wide range of techniques and, particularly, the
rapid development of modern diagnostics for engine combustion
research in the last decade, it is difficult, even for a
specialist, to acquire an adequate overview of the achievements in
this field. A newcomer to engines research must wade through a
number of research monographs and many widely scattered journal or
conference papers in order to assimilate the current state of the
art and the tools available for research. This is obviously
inconvenient for both graduate students or research and development
engineers who wish to pursue engines research. While supervising
research students and staff in their laboratories and in working
with research and development engineers in industry, we found that,
in the literature, there is a lack of a systematic approach to
engine instrumentation and in-cylinder measurements. The purpose of
this book, therefore, is to provide, between one set of covers, a
rather complete description of instrumentation and in-cylinder
measurement techniques for IC engines. This book is written
primarily for researchers and engineers involved in advanced
research and development of internal combustion engines, as well as
for postgraduate students. It provides an introduction to the
instrumentation and experimental techniques that are suitable for
in-cylinder measurements and, at the same time, includes sufficient
details for the readers to be able to set up and apply these
techniques to IC engines. Additional emphasis here is on the
applications of these techniques to improve the understanding of
combustion and pollutant formation processes in IC engines.