Merritt engine

The Merritt engine is a design conceived by Dan Merritt, an engineer at Coventry University. Rather than being entirely new, it is a development of the standard petrol engine. The engine is intended to provide "diesel levels of efficiency through a lean-burn strategy similar to that of direct injection". Merritt proposes that fuel/air mixing is not done in the cylinder, but takes place beforehand in a special chamber designed to promote swirl.[1]

The Merritt technique is also known as MUSIC – for Merritt Unthrottled Spark Ignition Combustion.[2] Brian Knibb, an engineer in Derby, UK, says it is relatively straightforward to modify existing engines to run in this way. “To produce MUSIC engines, a factory would simply need to change the cylinder head fitted to engines, leaving the cylinders and the rest unchanged.”[3]