Gasoline Direct Injection - History - Early Systems

Early Systems

The invention of direct gasoline injection was by the French inventor of the V8 engine configuration, Leon Levavasseur in 1902. Levavasseur designed the original Antoinette firm's series of V-form aero engines, starting with the Antoinette 8V to be used by the aircraft the Antoinette firm built that Levavasseur also designed, flown from 1906 to the firm's demise in 1910, with the world's first V16 engine, using Levavasseur's direct injection and producing some 100 hp, flying an Antoinette VII monoplane in 1907.

The first post-World War I example of direct gasoline injection was on the Hesselman engine invented by Swedish engineer Jonas Hesselman in 1925. Hesselman engines used the ultra lean burn principle and injected the fuel in the end of the compression stroke and then ignited it with a spark plug, it was often started on gasoline and then switched over to run on diesel or kerosene. The Hesselman engine was a low compression design constructed to run on heavy fuel oils.

Direct gasoline injection was applied during the Second World War to almost all higher-output production aircraft powerplants made in Germany (the widely-used BMW 801 radial, and the popular inverted inline V12 Daimler-Benz DB 601, DB 603 and DB 605, along with the similar Junkers Jumo 210, Jumo 211 and Jumo 213, starting as early as 1937 for both the Jumo 210 and DB 601), the Soviet Union's (Shvetsov ASh-82FN radial, 1943, Chemical Automatics Design Bureau - KB Khimavtomatika) and the US (Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone radial, 1944).

The first automotive direct injection system used to run on gasoline was developed by Bosch, and was introduced by Goliath and Gutbrod in 1952. This was basically a high-pressure diesel direct-injection pump with an intake throttle valve set up. (Diesels only change the amount of fuel injected to vary output; there is no throttle.) This system used a normal gasoline fuel pump, to provide fuel to a mechanically driven injection pump, which had separate plungers per injector to deliver a very high injection pressure directly into the combustion chamber. The 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL, the first production sports car to use fuel injection, used direct injection. The Bosch fuel injectors were placed into the bores on the cylinder wall used by the spark plugs in other Mercedes-Benz six-cylinder engines (the spark plugs were relocated to the cylinder head). Later, more mainstream applications of fuel injection favored the less-expensive indirect injection methods.

Research was conducted in the early 1970s with the backing of American Motors Corporation (AMC) to develop a Straticharge Continuous Fuel-Injection (SCFI) system. The conventional spark ignited internal combustion AMC straight-6 engine was modified with a redesigned cylinder head. The system incorporated a mechanical device that automatically responded to the engine’s airflow and loading conditions with two separate fuel-control pressures supplied to two sets of continuous-flow injectors. Flexibility was designed into the SCFI system for trimming it to a particular engine. Prototype "straticharge" engine road testing was performed using a 1973 AMC Hornet, but the mechanical fuel controls had teething problems.

The Ford Motor Company developed a stratified-charge engine in the late 1970s called "ProCo" (programmed combustion) using a unique high-pressure pump and direct injectors. At least one hundred and fifteen (115) Crown Victoria cars were built at Ford's Atlanta Assembly in Hapeville, Georgia using a ProCo V8 engine. The project was canceled for several reasons: electronic controls, a key element, were in their infancy; pump and injector costs were extremely high; and lean combustion produced nitrogen oxides in excess of near future United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits. The three-way catalytic converter proved to be a less expensive solution.