To DieselsRcool: Aww, shucks :oops:
I think lean/rich applies to diesels. But of course it's not uniform throughout the combustion chamber like it is with gasoline motors. On a diesel some areas in the combustion chamber (right near the injector spray) are getting much more fuel than others (dead space in the main chamber). The areas with more fuel are rich (sometimes too rich, if it's smoke) and the areas with less fuel are likely lean. Increasing the fueling beyond the smoke level will make some of the areas overly-rich, but will also make some of the areas that used to be too lean richer. That's why turning up the fuel even when there is smoke will continue to give more power. Because mixing isn't as good in a diesel (where the fuel gets milliseconds right before TDC to mix) as in a gas engine (where fuel is mixed close to perfectly before it enters the combustion chamber), the diesel will make less power for a given air quantity than a gas motor.
I make no claims to be an expert specifically to the IDI, so here goes... :shock: What I do know is that the x.xx mm setting is a timing setting, not a mixture one (i.e. higher number, more advanced -- correct?)
On that basis, yeah the mechanic who did the work on the original poster's engine was either honestly mistaken or just didn't know what he was talking about...
Jake hit the nail right on the head with regards to the varying heterogeneity of the fuel-air ratios within the combustion chamber of a Diesel. I'd only add that the only reason why the temperature/mixture logic in a gasser doesn't seem to work in the Diesel world is because the operational range of
overall fuel-air mixtures in Diesels are off the scale to the lean side of what a typical gasser engine would normally be able to operate. Even at the smoke limit, a good Diesel engine is still operating at fuel-air ratios over 18:1, which is basically the misfire limit of of homogeneous gasser engines. How "rich" a Diesel can run before reaching the smoke limit is what's called the "air utilization" ratio or rate or efficiency); at 18:1 this would be about 83% if stoichiometric is assumed to be 15:1. (The term "air utilization" used here is the inverse of another term, "excess air.") What this means is that no matter what you do, you cannot utilize more than 83% of the available oxygen in the air to burn the given amount of fuel. Or stated in terms of "excess air" there is 20% more air than is required to completely burn a given amount of fuel.
Combustion temperatures have a bell-shaped pattern in relation to the fuel-air ratio, with its peak just lean of stoichiometric (which not coincidentally is the point of optimum thermal efficiency in any engine, the reason of which can be attributed to thermodynamics). At either side of the peak, combustion temperatures fall off pretty quickly, and when you get to the fuel-air ratio regime that a Diesel operates in (> 18:1), the bell shaped curve has pretty much flattened such that there's not a heck of a lot of difference when you change the F/A ratio. Note that the bell-shaped pattern is surprisingly pretty INVARIATE REGARDLESS OF THE FUEL USED (comparing within hydrocarbon fuels; hydrogen and alcohols are slightly different).
So in conclusion, Jake, you're right