PREFACE : Over the last decade, significant progress has been made in the development of  direct  injection  internal  combustion  engines.  It  may  have  been  by coincidence  that  direct  injection  technology  was  developed  and  applied almost simultaneously to spark ignition (SI) gasoline engines and light-duty diesel engines in the mid-1990s, but the direct injection technology had been adopted in both engines for the same reason – to increase the efficiency of internal combustion (IC) engines for automotive applications while improving their performance. However, the route to growth and market penetration has proved more haphazard in the case of direct injection SI engines, owing to relatively  high  cost,  lower  than  expected  gains  in  fuel  economy  and  full load  performance,  their  complexity  and...