Lean burn engines

In an ideal, 100 per cent efficient internal combustion engine, the

fuel would burn to give just carbon dioxide and water vapour. In
practice, of course, engines are far from efficient and the
combustion process. also produces carbon monoxide, oxides of
nitrogen and unburnt hydrocarbons, as well as carbon dioxide and
water vapour.
Ford CVH Lean-burn engine

Carburettor

Rocker arm

Hydraulic
tappet

Camshaft

Kidney-shaped
combustion
chamber

Inlet
valve

Camshaft
drive belt
Shaped piston
crown

Crankshaft

Sump

In 1980 Ford introduced their CVH engine in the Escort 3, as a replacement for the old five-bearing
pushrod OHV Kent engine. The engine's designation derives from its design Compound Valve angle,

Hemispherical combustion chamber.

Now the CVH has been re-engineered to make it a true lean-burn engine, capable of running on air-fuel
ratios of over 18:1. This meant a change in the cylinder head design to incorporate a lean-burn kidneyshaped combustion chamber to ensure high mixture swirl and therefore more complete fuel burning.

These by-products of combustion are expelled as part of the car's exhaust gases
into the atmosphere where they cause pollution.
In recent years, public concern about atmospheric pollution, and imminent EEC
pollution-control laws, has led to car manufacturers trying to find ways of
reducing the level of these gases in car exhausts.

Approaches
There are two basic approaches to reducing harmful exhaust emissions - using
lean-burn engines or attaching catalytic converters to the exhaust system.
Lean-burn engines are designed to produce a lower level of harmful emissions
by better combustion control and more complete burning inside the engine
cylinders.
Catalytic converters clean up the exhaust gases coming from the engine.
Catalysts are the older of the two systems, and have been used in the US and
Japan for some years.

Catalysts
Catalytic converters are fitted by the car manufacturer downstream of the
engine in the exhaust system. It looks like a slightly swollen silencer and
contains a fine metal or ceramic honeycomb, coated with platinum or a related
metal, across which the exhaust gases flow.
The platinum initiates a chemical reaction in which the harmful exhaust
constituents are converted into harmless nitrogen, carbon dioxide and water
vapour.

The problem with catalytic converters is that they sap engine power and reduce
fuel economy. They also lead to increased maintenance costs.
Another drawback is that the catalytic system needs unleaded petrol to work
properly, because any lead in the exhaust gases quickly ruins the catalyst's
efficiency. And some European countries, such as Britain, have none or very few
outlets for unleaded petrol, with little hope of establishing a comprehensive
network for distributing the new fuel in the near future.

Inside the CVH combustion chamber

Ford's lean-burn engine, based on the
CVH, has a combustion chamber
which is kidney shaped it looks
rather like an off-centre hemispherical

Inlet valve

Spark plug

Squish
band

chamber.
This type of design ensures good

Offset
kidney-shaped
chamber

breathing, and the enhanced 'squish'

effect means that the fuel and air will
be well mixed for ignition. The mixture is forced up and sideways into the kidney
shape of the chamber, rather than just being pushed into the more regular
hemisphere of the earlier design.

The efficient fuel/air

mixing allows the flame
With the piston on its
downward stroke, the
inlet valve opens to let in

The piston begins its

upward stroke to
compress the mixture. In

to continue travelling
evenly through the

The spark plug fires and

combustion chamber and
ignites the mixture inside

a charge of fuel and air. doing so, it mixes the fuel the combustion chamber. drive the piston down.
As the mixture enters the and air fully by squashing
cylinder, it 'swirls'.

it into the combustion

The flame begins to

travel quickly through the
chamber.

Leaner mixtures
These problems have forced car manufacturers to look elsewhere for ways of
reducing exhaust emissions. The most obvious avenue for reducing emissions
is to burn less fuel in the first place.
This requires an improvement in thermal efficiency, which is now very difficult
to achieve because all the readily available routes have already been
implemented.
One remaining possibility is to produce a 'leaner' mixture, namely to reduce the
proportion of fuel in the fuel/air mixture entering the engine.

Fuel/air ratios
Petrol burns best in a standard car engine when it is mixed with air in the
proportions 14.7:1 - nearly 15 parts of air to every one part of petrol. In practice
the mixture strength varies between about 13:1 and 16:1, depending on the
speed of an engine and its load at the time. At these mixtures, engines produce
fairly high levels of harmful exhaust gas emissions, particularly during initial
acceleration.
When you try to move away from the ideal fuel/air ratio, the engine's running is
affected - if the engine is fed too much fuel it produces smoke, wears out quickly
and is expensive to run. If the engine is made to run too lean, combustion
becomes extremely variable from one cycle to the next, exhaust gas
temperatures rise because of the persistence of flames from 'late-burn' cycles,
and the engine starts to misfire frequently. All of these result in high levels of
hydrocarbons in the exhaust gases.
To overcome the difficulties in making an engine run well on leaner mixtures, the

air/fuel mixture needs to be more intimately mixed and the actual spark timing
and combustion process needs to be very finely controlled.

Engine management
To this end, some car manufacturers are fitting engine management systems
where sophisticated electronics control both the ignition and the fuel delivery
systems. This makes it possible to make sure that the spark plugs fire at just the
right moment to ignite a fresh fuel/air charge, which may otherwise be reluctant
to ignite.
Also under development are engine parts made of new materials that have
greater heat resistance, such as pistons made of ceramics. But most
development is going into ensuring that the air and fuel are well mixed.

Stir the mixture

In reducing the proportion of fuel in the mixture entering the engine, car
manufacturers have encountered problems with misfiring and incomplete
combustion which have, in some cases, increased rather than decreased fuel
consumption.
To get round these problems, the industry has tried different ways of `stirring'
the mixture just prior to ignition, with the aim of promoting faster burning and
more complete combustion.
There are three main ways of stirring the mixture. First, the engine's inlet ports
can be shaped to cause swirl - a technique borrowed from direct injection diesel
engines. Second, a deflector, or 'fence', around which the mixture has to flow,
may be positioned near the inlet valve or valves. And third, the combustion
chamber itself can be made smaller than the cylinder bore to create what is
known as a 'squish' effect - under compression from the upcoming piston, the
fuel / air mixture has to squeeze itself into the combustion chamber, and this
increases the density of the fuel droplets in the chamber.
Working out how best to design the engine so it can cope with very lean fuel

mixtures is a very difficult process. Part of the problem is trying to see what
actually goes on inside a combustion chamber when the fuel/air mixture is
burning, particularly when the throttle is rapidly opened or closed.
So researchers are now using a quartz window in the combustion chamber,
combined with a cine camera and complex computer programming, to see
exactly what is going on inside. From this they can tell how and where the flame
is spreading, which gives an indication of how fully the mixture is burning.

The way ahead

Toyota's partial lean-burn system

Fuel injector

Spark
plug

Swirl control
valve
Combustion
chamber

The latest Toyota engine, featuring turbocharging and supercharging and used in their FXV concept car,
has the inlet ports for each cylinder separated into two one straight and one helical. At high engine
speeds, both ports are open, but at low loads, a control valve in the straight port remains closed. All the
mixture goes down the helical port, creating a swirl effect in the combustion chamber. This swirl mixes
the fuel and air more fully. The fuel content in the mixture is very finely metered by individually
controlled injectors to increase clean running still further.

The current generation of lean-burn engines run on ratios of around 17:1 or 18:1,
and the next generation should run with ratios averaging 20:1 or 22:1.
But lean-bum technology still has some way to go before it fully meets the
proposed EEC laws. Some manufacturers are proposing to use a combination of
a catalyst and a lean-burn engine to meet the demands of the new regulations.

Fiat CHT engine

Like Ford's CVH, the Fiat 2 litre
CHT engine is derived from an
existing engine, the Fiat twin-cam,
a design that has been around for
some years. CHT stands for

Butterfly
flap
Main
inlet
tract

Cut-out

Controlled High Turbulence, which

describes how the air and fuel is
mixed thoroughly before
combustion. Mounted in the inlet
manifold is a butterfly flap.
At full throttle, the butterfly is open
and the fuel/air mixture follows its
normal route along the inlet
manifold to the combustion
chambers. But at light throttle, a
connection to the throttle closes
the butterfly (apart from a small
cut-out which allows some of the
mixture through). Most of the
fuel/air mixture is forced along a
different, narrower passage to the
chambers which causes the mixture to flow faster.

Turbulence Grid

Smaller
high-turbulence
tract

Exhaust
valve
Exhaust
gases

Inlet
valve
Lean
fuel/air
mixture

Micro
turbulence
grid

A British company, Epicam, is developing a turbulence grid to help control the motion of the fuel/air
mixture before it enters the engine.
The grid is mounted on the upper surface of the inlet valve, creating high-speed microturbulence in the
mixture as it enters the combustion chamber. The grid's microturbulence has advantages over the
eddies (turbulence) in current lean-burn engines. Large eddies can cause problems in initial ignition and
later in the engine's cycle, when the ignited mixture can lose heat via a 'scrubbing' effect on the cylinder
walls, or even extinguish itself.
A problem with the turbulence grid is that it can impede the airflow into the engine, which reduces the
power, but with careful design this can be kept to minimum.