Dynamic Spark Advance Technology for Gasoline Fuel Blends

Fuel efficiency is one of the most important customer requirement in Indian market as well as very crucial to meet the upcoming regulation like CAFÉ for Indian Automotive manufacturers. Most of the technology changes to meet this challenge, always come with a cost penalty with hardware addition. To counter the above challenge, we identified a strategy in the EMS software, without any hardware change, that will dynamically adapt the spark timing based on fuel quality. This strategy has resulted in fuel efficiency improvement on MIDC as well as on-road as per customer driving pattern. Going forward the availability of Ethanol Blended Fuels are going to increase multifold, to take advantage of this, the dynamic spark advance strategy has been proposed in this paper. This paper elaborates on the work done to develop and validate the EMS Strategy as well as the test results with different Ethanol Fuel Blends.