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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.

To meet the recent emission standard and fuel economy, it is required to scale down engine component sizes. For the ignition system, we would like to reduce the physical size of an ignition coil as well. However the present direct-ignition (DI) engine requires long spark duration time, and which makes difficult to reduce the physical size of the ignition coil. NTK developed a special method to achieve the goal. The presented paper introduces size reduction of the ignition coil and shortening the spark duration time for good ignition performance with the carbon fouling detection capability. Occurrence of the carbon fouling accompanies abnormal spark around the spark nose area always. Accordingly, this paper describes also a method detecting the abnormal spark, by using discharge current method or spark plug voltage. Furthermore, this paper describes the method of early detection of misfire and evasive control by detecting the abnormal spark.

NGK Spark Plug has developed new Multi Spark Ignition (MSI) system to improve fuel economy and engine cold start performance. Since engine ignition is the very first stage of reaction process, which leads to subsequent combustion and emission formations, it plays an important function to determine the efficiencies of power conversion and characteristics of exhaust gas. In addition to the conventional function of combustible gas ignition, the spark plug detects ion current surrounding the plug gap to analyze state of combustion. The developed MSI system demonstrated significant performance advantages on engine ignitions and detection of combustion characteristics for engine optimal control.

A new low cost, quick responding, and compact NOx sensor using ZrO2 thick film and the meter have been developed. The sensor is amperometric and consists of two cells: the first cell is an oxygen pumping cell; the second cell is also oxygen pumping cell extracting oxygen from NOx by dissociating it into O2 and N2 gas. The oxygen pumping current in the second cell is proportional to the NOx gas concentration in the second cell and the exhaust gas. The meter is small size, light weight and can measure NOx and A/F ratio at the same time. An unique electronic algorithm is also developed to optimize the electrochemical control system effectively.