Diesel passenger car is superior to gasoline engine car in the fuel economy, but it has some defects to improve :noise, startability, particulate and transient performance, etc.
Among these problems, this paper presents particularly transient performance in a diesel engine and clarifies the causes of its decline at lower temperature operation.
As the results, it is found that the transient torque at the early stage of acceleration is only 50% at −20°C, and that when coolant temperature went up to 20°C, the transient torque approaches to that of the warmed up engine.
The transient response becomes worse with retarding the injection timing and with decreasing the engine speed. On the other hand, since the normal response is not obtained despite of using high cetane number fuel, main cause of the inferior transient torque is not the poor combustion, but the increase of friction or cooling loss.