The homogeneous charge, lean burn, fast burn, and high compression ratio engine is the most efficient and cleanest engine under normal driving conditions. Under high load, with the help of the catalyst, it has low emissions and high power. The best known competitors are the hybrid, diesel, HCCI and fuel cell, but they share three problems. First, they are over-complex. Second, they have a high cost. And third, they have to meet certain efficiency and power goals – if they are ever to achieve their promised fuel economy and high power.

The most practical of the four is the Diesel, but it has three limitations relative to an ideal gasoline engine. Firstly, it is less powerful and more polluting that the gasoline engine because it cannot utilize all the air it breathes, i.e. it cannot inject, mix, and burn the fuel near top center, and therefore cannot operate at 14.7 air-fuel ratio for full power and for use of the 3-way catalyst. Secondly, it is no more efficient that a gasoline engine operating ultra-lean, and less efficient than a gasoline engine using variable compression ratio. Thirdly, the diesel is more expensive, complex, heavy and underpowered (uses a turbo-charger), and has a fundamental emission problem.

On the other hand, the ideal 2-valve gasoline engine can be the simplest and lowest cost engine, which with the help of the CEI ignition, can be made to operate lean, fast burn, and homogeneous charge with the leanest air-fuel ratio ability. The Honda Fit and Chrysler Hemi, similar to the CEI 2-valve, 2-plug engine but lacking in lean burn and fast burn. They are the most efficient engines but more powerful, simpler and lower cost than the diesel. With the escalating cost of oil and global warming, the 2-valve, 2-plug, lean burn engine can become the engine of the future.

It is the combination of CEI’s squish-flow and dual-ignition that give the 2-valve engine the record in leanness. In 2001, CEI gave an SAE paper (2001-01-0548) on the success of lean burn, and in 2004 it gave a GPC paper, Vol. 29, on high engine efficiency. Yet people continued to see lean burn as an unsolved problem and continued to work on complex approaches to lean burn and fuel efficiency. Below are the key breakthroughs which make the 2-valve, 2-plug engine into the modern, sophisticated engine, able to meet the goals of lean-burn, high power, and fuel efficiency, believed not possible until now.

The 2-valve engine promises to be what the May Fireball was at its time: a lean burn, fast burn, homogeneous charge engine with 45% higher efficiency. CEI’s 30 years of work on lean burn, and its seven years of work on ignition and the 2-valve engine promises to have the lowest-cost, highest efficiency, lean burn engine of its kind. Patents were issued in 2000, 2001, and three critical ones in 2007, to make the CEI’s technologies groundbreaking. For engine and car makers, caught up in today’s over-complexities and cost, CEI’s success can bring relief in the form of the 2-valve engine on which the American automotive industry was built. The 2-valve engine has been brought to a level of success where it can meet new demands for cost, fuel efficiency, emissions and power.