Sam Abuelsamid

Since our first encounter with General Motors' HCCI (homogeneous charge compression ignition) engines in August 2007, the powertrain research engineers at GM's Tech Center in Warren, MI have continued plugging away at the technology, trying to turn it into a marketable reality. The basic premise of compression ignition is simple.

Based on the Ideal gas law (PV=nRT), if you decrease the volume of a particular quantity of air, the temperature rises to the point where fuel will spontaneously combust. The hard part is controlling the pressure, temperature and air/fuel mixtures precisely enough to manage that combustion without causing excess noise and engine damage.

When we first tried the HCCI prototypes a couple of years ago, the engines had a fairly narrow band of HCCI operation with the engine running in basic spark ignition mode the rest of the time.

Thanks to a newly developed mixed-mode HCCI feature and external EGR, the engines can now run in HCCI from idle all the way to 60 mph.We had a chance to drive a Saturn Aura with an HCCI engine based on the 2.2-liter EcoTec four-cylinder around the streets near the Tech Center. The engine ran smoothly and transitions between HCCI and spark ignition really couldn't be felt.

The only indication of a transition was a slight ringing sound over the first couple of power cycles after transition.The basic hardware for a production HCCI engine is in place now, with the only new piece of hardware being a combustion chamber pressure sensor. GM is continuing to work on the control software to make this a robust system and even adapting the homogeneous charge and pressure sensors to diesel engines to reduce NOx emissions.

GM says that HCCI engines can achieve about a 15% improvement in fuel efficiency compared to a similar spark ignition engine – at a much lower cost than a hybrid. The automaker hopes to have HCCI engines in production in about five years.

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