Patent ID: 7334561

Claim:
A method of operating an internal combustion engine with homogeneous fuel combustion, wherein a condition variable in a cylinder is determined as a function of a crank angle and a signal about a cylinder condition is obtained therefrom, wherein at least two characteristic cycle values from a group comprising mass fraction of injected fuel burned, maximum pressure increase in the cylinder, combustion noise, start of combustion or duration of combustion are determined from the cylinder condition signal, the determined characteristic cycle values are compared with desired values for the characteristic cycle values entered in a characteristic diagram and a given difference between the two values is computed and the difference is supplied to a regulation algorithm and a time of fuel ignition of at least one injection event or an inert gas fraction in the cylinder is adjusted as a correcting variable in order to stabilize combustion and to minimize noise and exhaust emission, wherein the condition variable is selected from pressure and temperature.