One of the cool things about working at Argonne National
Laboratory is exploring new ideas. I’ve worked on a lot of
combustion technologies, including hydrogen, but right now I’m
doing something really unusual — burning gasoline in a diesel
engine. The first question you’re probably asking is, “Why in
the world do you want to do that?” Well, I got the idea after
talking to some colleagues who have been working on similar
concepts. We’re working on a combustion system that’s not
traditional diesel combustion but not spark-ignition combustion
either. Most researchers call this approach low temperature
combustion, or LTC. Several types have been explored, such as
HCCI (homogeneous charge compression ignition), M-K (modulated
kinetics or smokeless rich) and UNIBUS (uniform bulky
stratified) combustion. Why, you ask, would we explore this
alphabet soup of technologies when when traditional diesel and
spark ignition have served us well for more than a century?
Because traditional diesel combustion spews a lot of pa