The Effect on Vehicle Performance of Injector Deposits in a Direct Injection Gasoline Engine

This work presents a follow-up to previous efforts by the authors to investigate the susceptibility of gasoline direct injection (g-di) engines to deposit formation and the effect of those deposits on vehicle performance. A series of injector keep clean and clean up tests in base and additized fuels utilizing the ASTM D 5598 cycle provided a range of injector fouling levels. It is found that the g-di engine employed here is more susceptible to injector deposits than even the sensitive port fuel injected (PFI) engine used as industry reference in the D 5598 procedure. Injector keep clean and clean up performance of several representative deposit control chemistries are evaluated. In order to determine the effect of injector fouling on performance, emissions and driveability tests are performed on the vehicles at varying levels of injector fouling. Regulated emissions, particulates, fuel consumption and driveability are all shown statistically to be linked to injector fouling. The increase in emissions comparing clean versus highly deposited injectors is, in most cases, much higher than the effect observed for deposited versus clean engines with low levels of injector fouling in a previous study.