Quantifying diesel injector coking with computer vision

ABSTRACT Vegetable oil fuels and highly viscous petroleum fuels cause injector nozzle coking when burned in diesel engines. A technique was developed to use computer vision to quantify the amount of carbon accumulated on injectors by measuring the net carbon profile around each orifice. Various fuel formulations produced carbon shadows that differed by more than 4600 pixel counts, while the vision system could measure carbon shadows to within 50 pixel counts.