There aren’t many car owners out there who take fuel injection into consideration. For this, you have to look at the more serious gearheads. Sure, loads of people talk about the cars with the best fuel efficiency. They talk about which cars let you get the most bang for your buck each time you gas up. However, you should also care about the factors that contribute to this massive selling point.
How Does a Standard Engine Work?
Since this may not be known to a lot of people, we will begin by talking about how a car’s engine operates. This may seem intimidating, seeing as it requires the intense coordination of hundreds of moving parts. For the purposes of this discussion, you only need to remember that an engine needs fuel, air, and a spark to generate the force required to move a vehicle. The way the fuel meets with these two other elements varies from a standard gasoline engine and a direct injection engine. The latter, being newer, is currently hailed as the more effective option. Let’s discuss the difference between how the two of them operate.
In a standard gasoline engine, the fuel travels from the fuel tank through the various fuel lines and into fuel injectors by way of a specialized pump. This journey doesn’t stop there; however, as the injectors spray the fuel of choice – in this case, gasoline – into a part known as the intake manifold. This is where fuel and air are combined into a fine, combustible mist that is useful to the car’s engine.
Afterwards, this mist enters the different cylinders of the car’s engine, as intake valves open and close in a precisely timed manner. The pistons in the cylinders descend to let the fuel in and then ascend to compress it. The spark plug in each cylinder then ignites the fuel contained within each of the cylinders in order to turn the crankshaft, which sends the needed power to move the wheels.
Direct Injection Engines Do It Differently
On the other hand, direct injection engines are more efficient due to the fact that they skip a step in this complicated process. Instead of having the fuel hang and mingle with the air in an intake manifold, it is sent directly into the combustion chamber. Another way that direct injection engines are more efficient is because they make use of a leaner mixture of air and fuel. This means that there is more air compared to fuel – a 40:1 ratio. Meanwhile if there is more fuel than air, then it is a rich mixture. Using a relatively lean mixture helps stretch out your fuel, so you don’t have to spend your hard-earned cash on refills every couple of days.
Lean fuel mixtures can be burned more conservatively, as opposed to their “rich” counterpart. Leaner fuel mixtures are also burned more completely in a car, especially if it used in conjunction with a direct injection engine. A direct injection engine will deliver the fuel straight to the part of the combustion chamber with the highest temperature. In most cases, this is somewhere near the car’s spark plugs. This means that there is less wastage compared to the air dispersal technique used in a standard gasoline engine.
The Benefits of Direct Injection
There are also parts on the direct injection engine that aren’t available on the standard one, and vice versa. For example, direct injection engines have something called a fuel rail that helps bring the fuel directly to the injectors. This is the part that allow the bypassing of the air intake manifold. There are also specialized programs on engine management computers that can tell you how you need to measure things like flow rate and droplet size. Aside from the key comparisons we have discussed earlier in this article, there really isn’t much of a contrast between the two. In spite of this, the difference in terms of performance is quite noticeable.
Direct injection engines are also better for the environment compared to standard engines due to their cleaner emissions. Direct injection engines have catalytic converters that greatly reduce the negative effects of the high oxides of the nitrogen emissions (NOx) that come from directly injecting fuel into the engine’s cylinders. This effect is most obvious in the two-stroke direct injection engines that are found in vehicles such as off-road motorcycles and personal watercrafts.
If you install a turbocharger in your car, then you might find yourself saving even more fuel. This is because a turbocharger helps provide additional power to a vehicle by sucking cold air in and blowing cold air out. If this sounds familiar, it’s because they work in a similar fashion to a jet engine. This hot air is directed to the back of the unit where it passes a turbine, which in turn assists in driving a compressor near the front of the engine. Since more air is pumped into this area, the fuel is burned in a more efficient manner, which produces more “energy per second.” A supercharger works in much the same way, but it’s powered by the crankshaft instead.
Some cars already come from their respective manufacturers turbo or supercharged. Because of the additional power produced by these parts, experts claim that fuel consumption is cut down by as much as 15%. They also say that gasoline direct injection gives a car a whopping 50% more low-end torque as opposed to a standard engine variant. These figures alone can be very attractive to any car owner out there.
Possible Cons
While they have multiple benefits, direct injection engines aren’t necessarily perfect. For starters, they produce rather high amounts of NOx, as mentioned previously. The emissions produced are cleaner overall, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re there. This is why it is important to keep direct injection engines well-maintained – to minimize the run-off of these unhealthy particulate matter.
As for now, direct injection engines are also more expensive to produce compared to standard gasoline engines. They are about 5% pricier compared to normal engines. Having a car that directly sprays fuel for combustion could cost several hundred dollars more by virtue of the direct fuel rails and the catalytic converters. While this may seem like a hefty investment upfront, if you plan to use your gasoline direct injection car frequently, then you’ll save more money in the long run because of its superior fuel efficiency.
The Future of Direct Injection Engines
Previously, direct injection engines – like the ones used by default in diesel-powered cars – were slower and noisier. This turned off a lot of drivers during the initial offering where these engines heavily relied on their fuel-efficiency to sell. However, gone are the times of this inferiority. Because the noise and lack of acceleration weren’t as big of a concern in Japan and in Europe, both have made massive efforts in terms of developing direct injection engines for the mass market. In fact, both of them claim to be the first to do so. Thanks to these nations, these engines are now much quieter and pack more punch than ever before.
It’s a good thing that manufacturers are already looking into how to address the negative effects of these disadvantages. For instance, the NOx from direct injection engines have begun to disappear thanks to combining the effects of catalytic converters as well as newer technology known as exhaust gas recirculation. This works by taking a part of a vehicle’s exhaust gas and returning it to the engine’s cylinders for further combustion. Not only is this better from an environmental standpoint, it also helps improve fuel efficiency by bringing in more air.
Car manufacturers are also now pricing their direct injection engines more competitively due to the recent surge of this technology in today’s market. Aside from parts now being much more affordable than before, they are also developing techniques that greatly cut down the costs of developing these fuel-efficient machines. These don’t only make the engines cheaper, but they also allow them to be produced at a faster rate. It will be interesting to see how direct injection engines will evolve, especially now that they have to compete with hybrid gasoline engines as well as electric cars.
There is so much in store for the future of direct injection engines. For instance, car manufacturers from the United States are now getting into fuel-efficiency. General Motors (GM) offers an Ecotec engine that more than a dozen vehicles in their lineup have been using since the beginning of this decade. Ford is another U.S. developer in the forefront of this trend. They offer an EcoBoost engine that can be found in millions of their vehicles, dating as far back as 2009. That’s officially nine years that Ford has been using direct injection and they show absolutely no signs of slowing this down.
Now you know how direct injection is and how it works. If you’re planning to purchase a car in the near future, then you might want to consider getting one with this type of engine. Not only is it more fuel-efficient, it is also better for the environmentally-conscious.
Sources:
- How Direct Injection Engines Work, How Stuff Works
- How turbochargers work, Explain That Stuff
- Pros and Cons of Direct Injection Engines, Consumer Reports
