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After the second worldwide oil crisis, Brazil put in place by 1975 a strategic plan to stimulate the usage of ethanol (from sugar cane), to be mixed to the gasoline or to be sold as 100% ethanol fuel (known as E100). To enable an engine to operate with both gasoline and ethanol (and their mixtures), by 2003 the “Flex Fuel” technology was implemented. By 2012 calendar year, from a total of about 3.8 million vehicles sold in the Brazilian market, 91% offered the “Flex Fuel” technology, and great majority used a gasoline sub-tank to assist on cold starts (typically below 15°C, where more than 85% of ethanol is present in fuel tank). The gasoline sub-tank system suffers from issues such as gasoline deterioration, crash-worthiness and user inconvenience such as bad drivability during engine warm up phase. This paper presents fuel injector technologies capable of rapidly electrically heating the ethanol fuel for the Brazilian transportation market.

Gasoline Direct Injection (GDi) system is a relatively new technology. In early implementations, its major components, i.e. high pressure fuel pump, injectors, and fuel rails, emit objectionable acoustic noise during normal operation. This paper will focus on making an objective comparison (assessment) of acoustic noise emitted by several cam-driven high pressure fuel pumps during their normal operation, especially at engine idle. Taguchi robust engineering methods will be used to conduct the robust assessment study of six GDi high-pressure pumps. A-weighted total sound pressure level (SPL), processed from two free-field microphones around each pump, will be used as the main function in the Taguchi design of experiments (DOE).