This invention relates to spark ignition gasoline engines utilizing an antiknock agent which is a liquid fuel with a higher octane number than gasoline such as ethanol to improve engine efficiency.
It is known that the efficiency of spark ignition (SI) gasoline engines can be increased by high compression ratio operation and particularly by engine downsizing. The engine downsizing is made possible by the use of substantial pressure boosting from either turbocharging or supercharging. Such pressure boosting makes it possible to obtain the same performance in a significantly smaller engine. See, J. Stokes, et al., “A Gasoline Engine Concept For Improved Fuel Economy The Lean-Boost System,” SAE Paper 2001-01-2902. The use of these techniques to increase engine efficiency, however, is limited by the onset of engine knock. Knock is the undesired detonation of fuel and can severely damage an engine. If knock can be prevented, then high compression ratio operation and high pressure boosting can be used to increase engine efficiency by up to twenty-five percent.
Octane number represents the resistance of a fuel to knocking but the use of higher octane gasoline only modestly alleviates the tendency to knock. For example, the difference between regular and premium gasoline is typically six octane numbers. That is significantly less than is needed to realize fully the efficiency benefits of high compression ratio or turbocharged operation. There is thus a need for a practical means for achieving a much higher level of octane enhancement so that engines can be operated much more efficiently.
It is known to replace a portion of gasoline with small amounts of ethanol added at the refinery. Ethanol has a blending octane number (ON) of 110 (versus 95 for premium gasoline) (see J. B. Heywood, “Internal Combustion Engine Fundamentals,” McGraw Hill, 1988, p. 477) and is also attractive because it is a renewable energy, biomass-derived fuel, but the small amounts of ethanol that have heretofore been added to gasoline have had a relatively small impact on engine performance. Ethanol is much more expensive than gasoline and the amount of ethanol that is readily available is much smaller than that of gasoline because of the relatively limited amount of biomass that is available for its production. An object of the present invention is to minimize the amount of ethanol or other antiknock agent that is used to achieve a given level of engine efficiency increase. By restricting the use of ethanol to the relatively small fraction of time in an operating cycle when it is needed to prevent knock in a higher load regime and by minimizing its use at these times, the amount of ethanol that is required can be limited to a relatively small fraction of the fuel used by the spark ignition gasoline engine.