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In this study, a spark plug sensor for in-situ fuel concentration measurement was applied to a port injected lean-burn engine. Laser infrared absorption method was employed and a 3.392 μm He-Ne laser that coincides with the absorption line of hydrocarbons was used as a light source. In this engine, the secondary valve lift height of intake system was controlled to obtain appropriate swirl and tumble flow in order to achieve lean-burn with the characteristics of intake flow. For such in-cylinder stratified mixture distribution, the fuel concentration near the spark plug is very important factor that affects the combustion characteristics. Therefore, the mixture formation process near the spark plug was investigated with changing fuel injection timing. Under the intake stroke, the timing that fuel passed through near the spark plug depended largely on the fuel injection timing.

Optical fiber pressure sensors developed recently have merits of compact size, installation ease and relatively low cost. However, they are normally not suitable for IMEP measurement due to the insufficient measuring accuracy in low frequency range, which is vital for the measurement of indicated mean effective pressure (IMEP). On the other hand, it is confirmed that the IMEP is determined by the frequency components which are equivalent to, or twice greater than those of the engine speeds included in the indicated pressure wave form. The IMEP calculation method discussed in the following is capable of accurate calculation of IMEP, by checking the characteristics of the pressure sensor in advance and correcting the primary and secondary components of frequency properly. This paper describes the correction method and reports the measured results obtained in actual engine operations.

IMEP can be generally calculated by numerical integration on the PV diagram. However, this method requires a great number of sampled data per cycle, in order to ensure high accuracy in calculation. The present method is a to use only the primary and secondary components of engine speed from the pressure diagram based on the Fourier series. Owing to this method, calculation errors have become smaller than conventional method even though the number of samples is reduced, and calculation time is also reduced by the conventional method. Using present method, a Fourier series type combustion analyzing system has been developed. Real-time IMEP measurement is allowed in this system owing to the characteristic features described above, and the validity of calculated results is confirmed by comparing the results with the IMEP values obtained by batch processing through the numerical integration.