Effects of park energy on spark plug fault recognition in a spark ignition engine

The increasing demands for fuel economy and emission reduction have led to the development of lean/diluted combustion strategies for modern Spark Ignition (SI) engines. The new generation of SI engines requires higher spark energy and a longer discharge duration to improve efficiency and reduce the backpressure. However, the increased spark energy gives negative impacts on the ignition system which results in deterioration of the spark plug. Therefore, a numerical model was used to estimate the spark energy of the ignition system based on the breakdown voltage. The trend of spark energy is then recognized by implementing the classification method. Significant features were identified from the Information Gain (IG) scoring of the statistical analysis