A New England researcher says his technology makes existing vehicles 10 percent more efficient.

By David L. Chandler
The Boston Globe

ARLINGTON, Mass. -- You've got to give inventor Michael Ward credit for one thing: He certainly is not a quitter.

For two decades, while others chased flashier technologies, such as cars that ran on solar power or electric batteries, Ward stuck to the research equivalent of plain vanilla: He wanted to make existing car engines cleaner and more fuel-efficient.

Now, after years of doggedness and disappointment, Ward at last might have found a practical, affordable technology that could give nearly every vehicle on the road a 10 percent jump in fuel economy while reducing the toxic chemicals coming out of the tailpipe.

Ward, with a doctorate in applied physics from Harvard and more than 20 patents to his name, said that, in a series of lab tests over the last few months, his ``lean-burn'' engine has finally achieved results that were far beyond what even he thought would be possible.

Ward's engine in the shop of his small company here, called Combustion Electromagnetics, already has produced what he says is the best overall fuel economy ever achieved in a gasoline engine. With gas prices soaring and the mileage of new vehicles declining - because so many are the large, inefficient sport-utility vehicles - Ward's success might have come at an opportune time.

``His results have been quite dramatic,'' said Anthony Jarrett, the retired former director of research and development at Lucas Industries, a British automotive technology firm that ran a series of tests on an earlier version of Ward's system.

``The lean-burn engine that he has developed, in conjunction with his spark ignition system, together are quite unique and I think very impressive,'' Jarrett said.

The concept of lean-burn is deceptively simple. Basically it means increasing the amount of air mixed with the fuel as it enters the car's cylinders. This ensures tha the fuel burns more completely, improving efficiency and reducing the amount of unburned fuel that leaves the engine and must be controlled. But the problem has always been that the more diluted the fuel becomes the harder it is to light.

To be sure, Ward has believed he was near a breakthrough before, only to find that daunting obstacles remained, such as the size and cost of the technology. But, this time, Ward said the system has been refined so that it is smaller, lighter and should cost no more than conventional equipment.

But John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, cautioned that it is often hard to tell whether a technology that looks promising in the lab will prove practical in the highly competitive and hard-nosed automotive industry.

``People have tried conceptual changes to get lean-burn to work for a long time,'' he said. ``Inventions in this area are hard to evaluate.''