You may have read or heard one of your favorite Car Tech editors talking about gasoline direct injection and how it's one of the "big technologies" that's helping to keep the almost 200 year-old internal combustion engine alive well into the 21st century. In this week's issue of the ABCs of Car Tech, I'm going to explain just what the heck gasoline direct injection is and why you should care if it's in your next car's engine or not.
How did fuel injection work before direct injection?
The modern gasoline internal combustion engine (ICE) needs three things to spin its crankshaft: oxygenated air, fuel, and a spark to make the air and fuel explode. The air is drawn through the intake where it's measured by the car's Mass Air Flow (MAF) sensor before passing to the intake manifold where the single intake path is split into four to eight intake runners, each of which leads into one of your vehicle's cylindrical combustion chambers. Somewhere along the line, the intake charge is mixed with fuel before the spark plug makes it all go boom inside the combustion chamber. This is all ICE 101 for most of you, I'm sure.
Back in the ancient days of engine technology, the carburetors and single-point fuel injection systems did their relatively imprecise air and fuel mixing in or even before the intake manifold, adding about the right amount of fuel for entire bank of cylinders. For the most part, each combustion chamber got the what it needed. However, depending o... [Read more]
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