On board water recovery for water injection in high efficiency gasoline engines

Abstract

During the early days of combustion engine development, inventors and researchers soon discovered that, among many other issues, high compression-end-temperatures and thereby induced uncontrolled self-inflaming of the fuel / air mixture (later called knocking) as well as mechanical failure of engine components due to excessively high combustion- and exhaust gas temperatures were a major challenge when it came to optimizing their engines power density as well as high load efficiency. The impact of these effects further increased, when first inventors started to add external compressors (later called superchargers) as means of enhancing the air density and thus oxygen mass inside the combustion chamber.