Advances in The Design of Two-Stroke, High Speed, Compression Ignition EnginesAdvances in Internal Combustion Engines and Fuel Technologies

The most difficult challenge for modern 4-Stroke high speed Diesel engines is the limitation of pollutant emissions without penalizing performance, overall dimensions and production costs, the last ones being already higher than those of the correspondent S.I. engines. An interesting concept in order to meet the conflicting requirements mentioned above is the 2-Stroke cycle combined to Compression Ignition. Such a concept is widely applied to large bore engines, on steady or naval power-plants, where the advantages versus the 4-Stroke cycle in terms of power density and fuel conversion efficiency (in some cases higher than 50% [1]) are well known. In fact, the double cycle frequency allows the designer to either downsize (i.e. reduce the displacement, for a given power target) or “down-speed” (i.e. reduce engine speed, for a given power target) the 2-stroke engine. Furthermore, mechanical efficiency can be strongly improved, for 2 reasons: i) the gas exchange process can be completed with piston controlled ports, without the losses associated to a valve-train; ii) the mechanical power lost in one cycle is about halved, in comparison to a 4-Stroke engine of same design and size, while the indicated power can be the same: as a result, the weight of mechanical losses is lower.