HOTFIRE Project Wins Engineering Award; Homogeneous Direct Injection with Fully Variable Valve Train
Bellow is an excerpt from this article on the greencarcongress.com blog this morning. Direct Injection may be an idea whose time has come. Go to http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/10/hotfire-project.html#more to read the full article. The article states the strategy achieves an approximate 15% fuel savings through use of direct injection and variable valve timing.
HOTFIRE Project Wins Engineering Award; Homogeneous Direct Injection with Fully Variable Valve Train
21 October 2008
Project HOTFIRE has taken the top award in the automotive sector in ‘The Engineer Technology + Innovation Awards 2008’ in the UK. The project team, comprising engine designers from Lotus Engineering, fuel injection specialists from Continental Powertrain and thermodynamics and mechanics experts from University College London and Loughborough University, developed a gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine concept that reduces fuel consumption by 15%. The project was funded by EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council).
The end application of this project is a direct injection spark ignition engine architecture that does not require stratified lean burn combustion to achieve the approximate 15% fuel savings. This ensures that the system can be used over all speed/load ranges and eliminates the need for an expensive lean NOx trap which is usually required when lean combustion is employed.
—Geraint Castleton-White, Head of Powertrain at Lotus Engineering…
Source: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2008/10/hotfire-project.html#more
Tags: Fuel Efficiency, Miles Per Gallon, mpg