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Recently, waste heat recovery system from automobile exhaust gas has attracted a lot of attention as one of the promising technology to improve fuel efficiency and to reduce carbon dioxide emission. In order to put this system into practice, we developed a novel liquid-piston steam engine which has large potential of high efficiency, high reliability and low cost. Thermal efficiency of 12.7 % is achieved at temperatures of Th = 270 °C and l = 80 °C. Finally, electrical output of waste heat recovery system with the liquid-piston steam engine is estimated to be 44 or 79Wh under NEDC or HWFET modes, respectively.

Formula One engines, which are the pursuit of the ultimate in performance, tend to be comparatively vulnerable to durability issues. These engines sometimes run under a state of unstable combustion as compensation for improved fuel economy. To cope with these issues, there have been strong demands in the racing field for a technology that will allow constant monitoring and prompt action to be carried out on system malfunctions and failures, as well as unstable combustion. The research program described in this paper deals with an onboard technology for monitoring combustion under all the operational conditions using ionic current measurement. The technology will possibly be applied to engine management and car-to-pit communications via telemetering. The scope of the control it offers includes; detection of misfire and hesitation, detection and management of detonation, and management of lean-burn combustion.

The effect of the amount of refrigerant on automotive air conditioning system behavior was clarified through simulations and experiments. It has been revealed that the best way to measure the amount of refrigerant in an air-conditioning system is to measure the liquid-gas flow ratio in the liquid line. In order to measure the liquid-gas flow ratio, a mechanical sensor for fluids was developed and applied to a refrigerant monitoring system which can identify when the amount of refrigerant drops to 60% of the regular level.

The reduction of fuel consumption is of great importance to automobile manufacturers. As a prospective means to achieve fuel economy, lean burn is being investigated at various research organizations and automobile manufacturers and a number of studies on lean-burn technology have been reported to this date. This paper describes the development of a four-valve lean-burn engine; especially the improvement of the combustion, the development of an engine management system, and the achievement of vehicle test results. Major themes discussed in this paper are (1) the improvement of brake-specific fuel consumption under partial load conditions and the achievement of high output power by adopting an optimized swirl ratio and a variable-swirl system with a specially designed variable valve timing and lift mechanism, (2) the development of an air-fuel ratio control system, (3) the improvement of fuel economy as a vehicle and (4) an approach to satisfy the NOx emission standard.