CITROËN GOES DIRECT INJECTION PETROL FOR NEXT GENERATION XANTIA AND XSARA

French car maker, Citroën, has revealed that the next generation Citroën Xantia and Xsara will be powered by an all-new direct injection petrol engine that will cut fuel consumption by 19 per cent compared to its existing 2.0 litre engine.

Designed and developed in just 121 weeks, the new HPi engine is the first direct injection petrol engine from a European car maker and it will be manufactured at the rate of 200 units a day.

With a capacity of 2.0 litres, the HPi engine develops a power output of 103 kW. Its specific advantages are:

§ Fuel consumption is 19 per cent lower than the previous Citroën 2.0 litre engine. On the urban test cycle, the improvement is even more marked with a 21 per cent drop in fuel consumption.

§ Engine response is improved with a 9.6 per cent boost in torque to 170 Nm at 2000 rpm.

§ Environmental performance is enhanced with a drop in fuel consumption also producing a drop in the production of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. As well as meeting the Euro 3 clean air rules due for launch in 2001, the new HPi engine also meets the even tougher Euro 4 rules set for launch in 2005.

To achieve these targets, Citroën designed the HPi engine using the most advanced technology available today: lean burn stratified charge direct fuel injection. This involves playing the fuel/air mixture as close as possible to the spark plug and then filling the rest of the combustion chamber with air. This requires a remarkably high level of precision in injecting the fuel to match engine speed and demands.

As if this was not technically difficult enough, the engine runs in this lean burn mode up to 3500 rpm, the speeds used in urban driving, and above this engine speed it switches to normal stoichiometric mode, for performance driving.

Citroën developed the high-pressure pump for the HPi engine through a joint venture with Siemans. The pump supplies injection pressure of between 30 and 100 bars, compared to just 3.5 bar in a normal petrol fuel injection pump. This high pressure combined with the stratified charge enables significantly less fuel to be used for combustion and so lead to fuel savings.

The lean burn engine does, though leave considerably more oxygen in the exhaust gas and to stop excessive amounts of nitrogen oxides being produced, Citroën has developed a sequential NOx treatment system based on the storage release principle.

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