Internal exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is an effective strategy to reduce pumping loss and improve fuel economy using mixture dilution than traditional external EGR. In this paper, the internal EGR was obtained by exhaust gas trap (EGT) using the negative valve overlap (NVO) method The effects of EGT on the part-load characteristics, including energy conversion, combustion and emission characteristics were studied in a direct injection spark ignition (DISI) engine. The experimental results showed that EGT can save fuel consumption by 5-16% due to reduced pumping loss and improved combustion efficiency, while it also can increase the engine cyclic variation and combustion duration. The engine cyclic variation increases with increasing of the EGT level, this can be overcome by advancing spark timing to stabilize the combustion The flame propagation and compression combustion occurred simultaneously when high EGT level and high compression ratio were adopted, the combined combustion can reduce combustion duration but increase the engine cyclic variation. The stratified mixture using the two-stage injection strategy can reduce the engine cyclic variation and shorten the combustion duration so as to improve the thermal efficiency Moreover, the second injection mass ratio and timing take an important effect on the combustion and emission characteristics in DISI engines using EGT strategy. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved