Fuel injection
aspect of an internal combustion engine
Fuel injection is the introduction of fuel in an internal combustion engine, most commonly automotive engines, by means of a fuel injector. This article focuses on fuel injection in reciprocating piston and Wankel rotary engines.
All compression-ignition engines (e.g., diesel engines), and many spark-ignition engines (i.e., petrol (gasoline) engines, such as Otto or Wankel), use fuel injection of one kind or another. Mass-produced diesel engines for passenger cars (such as the Mercedes-Benz OM 138) became available in the late 1930s and early 1940s, being the first fuel-injected engines for passenger car use. In passenger car petrol engines, fuel injection was introduced in the early 1950s and gradually gained prevalence until it had largely replaced carburettors by the early 1990s. The primary difference between carburetion and fuel injection is that fuel injection atomizes the fuel through a small nozzle under high pressure. In contrast, carburetion relies on suction created by intake air accelerated through a Venturi tube to draw fuel into the airstream.
The term "fuel injection" is vague and encompasses various distinct systems with fundamentally different functional principles. The only commonality among fuel injection systems is the absence of carburetion.
There are two main functional principles of mixture formation systems for internal combustion engines: "internal" and "external." A fuel injection system that uses external mixture formation is called a manifold injection system.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q308881. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fuel injection” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.