The concept of fuel stratification has been proposed and applied to a four-valve port injection spark ignition engine. In this engine, two different fuels or fuel components are admitted through two separate inlet ports and stratified into two regions laterally by strong tumble flows. Each stratified region has a spark plug to control the ignition. This engine can operate in the stratified lean-burn mode at part loads when fuel is supplied only to one of the inlet ports. While at high load operation, an improved fuel economy and higher power output are also expected through increased anti-knock features by taking advantage of the superior characteristics of different fuel or fuel components. This is achieved by igniting the lower RON (research octane number) fuel first and leaving the higher RON fuel in the end gas region. In this paper, knock limits of homogenous and different fuel stratification combustion modes at high loads were investigated experimentally. Primary reference fuels (PRF), iso-octane and n-heptane, were used to simulate three fuels of different RON: RON90, RON95 and RON100. The research results show that with stratified fuel components of low and high octane numbers, the knock limit, as defined by the minimum spark advance for knocking combustion, was extended apparently when the lower RON fuel was ignited first. In addition, the knock limit could also be extended by increasing the amount of higher RON fuel. However, igniting first the lower RON fuel in the fuel stratification combustion mode produced little improvement in anti-knock behaviour over the homogeneous combustion of the mixture of those two stratified fuels with an average RON. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.