I think you will notice I did elaborate on the detonation/Compression ignition issue later
I agree that compressed air fuel mix of gasoline is harder to ignite, but the lower the compression the easier it is to ignite & pre-ignition often happens before high compression is achieved due to glowing components in the combustion chamber.
Compression is NOT linear in a cylinder, its exponential. By that I mean if you seal a cylinder with the piston at BDC, then move it towards TDC, it takes HALF the stroke to double the pressure once to 2bar, then half of the remaining stroke to double it again to 4bar, every halving of the remaining stroke doubles the pressure ! So if we say that 12/1 CR is difficult to ignite, but 6/1 is fairly easy, then the pressure goes from 6-12/1 in a few mm just before TDC ! That said in real gasoline engines few exceed 9/1 CR, due to valve overlap, unless running on high octane fuel. The combustion chamber volume is used to control the maximum CR achievable, in most engines
Compressing air creates heat & the heat creation is relative to the pressure applied, so the specific heat of the mixture reaches maximum at TDC on the compression stroke. So if you up the intake charge temperature, you may easily exceed the safe working temperature or self ignition temperature of the air fuel mix. Post turbo intake temperatures can exceed 90c if ambient is around 25c, this at 1.5bar boost, with a good inter-cooler this can be reduced to around 70c or less.
Adiabatic compression example here (
indicates that an ambient intake of 27c for 1000cc, compressed to 10/1 will produce an ideal gas temperature of 477c, this does NOT allow for containment cooling/heating, as in heat loss/gain to/from the components in contact with the air, depending if its a cooling or heating cycle. But you can get an idea from 10/1 compression creates 17.5/1 heat increase. Applying that to the 70c intake charge from the turbo (assuming 10/1 CR still) 70x17.5=1225c hence the reason that proper high boost turbos have to have very low static compression ratios. For NA engine at 20c intake the cylinder temps could reach 350c during compression. Compare that 7c difference, with everything else being the same & you have a potential 127c temperature differential, work it out as a percentage ratio & it will be approximately correct regardless of the cooling/heating effects of the containment components.
Hopefully that will explain one of the reasons why gasoline engines are more sensitive to intake charge temperature.