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Characterisation of modern complex powertrains is a time consuming and expensive process. Little effort has been made to improve the efficiency of testing methodologies used to obtain data for this purpose. Steady-state engine testing is still regarded as the golden standard, where approximately 90% of testing time is wasted waiting for the engine to stabilize. Rapid dynamic engine testing, as a replacement for the conventional steady-state method, has the potential to significantly reduce the time required for characterisation. However, even by using state of the art measurement equipment, dynamic engine testing introduces the problem that certain variables are not directly measurable due to the excitation of the system dynamics. Consequently, it is necessary to develop methods that allow the observation of not directly measurable quantities during transient engine testing. Engine testing for the characterisation of the engine air-path is specifically affected by this problem since the air mass flow entering the cylinder is not directly measurable by any sensor during transient operation. This dissertation presents a comprehensive methodology for engine air charge characterisation using dynamic test data. An observer is developed, which allows observation of the actual air mass flow into the engine during transient operation. The observer is integrated into a dual-ramp testing procedure, which allows the elimination of unaccounted dynamic effects by averaging over the resulting hysteresis. A simulation study on a 1-D gas dynamic engine model investigates the accuracy of the developed methodology. The simulation results show a trade-off between time saving and accuracy. Experimental test result confirm a time saving of 95% compared to conventional steady-state testing and at least 65% compared to quasi steady-state testing while maintaining the accuracy and repeatability of conventional steady-state testing.

<p>Continuously throughout the process of developing Engine Control Units (ECU), the ECU and its control functions need to be dimensioned and tested for the engine itself. Since interaction between an ECU and a physical engine is both expensive and inflexible, software models of the engine are often used instead. One such test system, where an ECU interacts with software models, is called Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL). This thesis describes a model constructed to facilitate implementation on a HiL testbed. </p><p>The model, derived in Matlab/Simulink, is a Cylinder-by-Cylinder Engine Model (CCEM) reconstructing the angle synchronous torque of a diesel engine. To validate the model, it has been parameterised for the DaimlerChrysler engine OM646, a straight turbocharged four cylinder diesel engine, and tested towards measured data from a Mercedes-Benz C220 test vehicle. Due to hardware related problems, validation could only be performed for low engine speeds where the model shows good results. Future work around this theme ought to include further validation of the model as well as implementation on HiL.</p>

Continuously throughout the process of developing Engine Control Units (ECU), the ECU and its control functions need to be dimensioned and tested for the engine itself. Since interaction between an ECU and a physical engine is both expensive and inflexible, software models of the engine are often used instead. One such test system, where an ECU interacts with software models, is called Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL). This thesis describes a model constructed to facilitate implementation on a HiL testbed. The model, derived in Matlab/Simulink, is a Cylinder-by-Cylinder Engine Model (CCEM) reconstructing the angle synchronous torque of a diesel engine. To validate the model, it has been parameterised for the DaimlerChrysler engine OM646, a straight turbocharged four cylinder diesel engine, and tested towards measured data from a Mercedes-Benz C220 test vehicle. Due to hardware related problems, validation could only be performed for low engine speeds where the model shows good results. Future work around this theme ought to include further validation of the model as well as implementation on HiL.

Les centaines de millions de véhicules du parc automobile mondial nous rappellent à quel point notre société dépend du moteur à combustion interne. Malgré des progrès significatifs en termes d’émissions polluantes et de consommation, les moteurs à essence et diesel demeurent l’une des principales sources de pollution de l’air des centres urbains modernes. Ce constat motive les autorités à renforcer les normes anti-pollution, qui tendent à complexifier la définition technique des moteurs. En particulier, un nombre croissant d’actionneurs fait aujourd’hui, du contrôle de la chaîne d’air, un challenge majeur. Dans un marché de plus en plus mondialisé et où le temps de développement de moteurs se doit d’être de plus en plus court, ces travaux entendent proposer une solution aux problèmes liés à cette augmentation de la complexité. La proposition repose sur une approche en trois étapes et combine : modélisation physique du moteur, contrôle prédictif non linéaire et programmation multiparamétrique. Le cas du contrôle de la chaîne d’air d’un moteur à essence suralimenté sert de fil conducteur au document. Dans son ensemble, les développements présentés ici fournissent une approche quasi-systématique pour la synthèse du contrôle de la chaîne des moteurs à essence suralimentés. Intuitivement, le raisonnement doit pouvoir être étendu à d’autres boucles de contrôle et au cas des moteurs diesel. / The hundreds of millions of passenger cars and other vehicles on our roads emphasize our society’s reliance on internal combustion engines. Despite striking progress in terms of pollutant emissions and fuel consumption, gasoline and diesel engines remain one of the most important sources of air pollution in modern urban areas. This leads the authorities to lay down increasingly drastic pollutant emission standards, which entail ever more complex engine technical definitions. In particular, due to an increasing number of actuators in the past few years, the air path of internal combustion engines represents one of the biggest challenges of engine control design. The present thesis addresses this issue of increasing engine complexity with respect to the continuous reduction in development time, dictated by a more and more competitive globalized market. The proposal consists in a three-step approach that combines physics-based engine modeling, nonlinear model predictive control and multi-parametric nonlinear programming. The latter leads to an explicit piecewise affine feedback control law, compatible with a real-time implementation. The proposed approach is applied to the particular case of the control of the air path of a turbocharged gasoline engine. Overall, the developments presented in this thesis provide a quasi-systematic approach for the synthesis of the control of the air path of turbocharged gasoline engines. Intuitively, this approach can be extended to other control loops in both gasoline and diesel engines.

To monitor and control the combustion in a diesel engine one can study the speed signal from the flywheel. The idea is that if individual cylinders give different amount of torque this will lead to variations in the flywheel speed. A model which describes the cylinder torque based on flywheel speed can be used to estimate the torque from individual cylinders. With this new knowledge of the individual performance of each cylinder the engine can be balanced. The balancing aim at making the speed of the flywheel more even but also required a model with estimated cylinder torque as input. This model may also be used for testing new control algorithms easily and gaining understanding of the dynamics. In this thesis a time dissolved model is constructed to describe the cylinder pressure-, crankshaft-, flywheel and damper dynamics. The model is based on a physical point of view by approximating the system into nodes containing mass, stiffness and friction. The inputs into the model are injection data from the engine management system (EMS) and a torque from a drive line. Ways to reduce the complexity of the model are investigated in order to invert the model to estimate the injection data based on flywheel speed measurements. Measurementsare done in a test bed to receive data required for model simulation and validation. The result is that the main behavior of the dynamics is caught. The self oscillation behaviors in some operating points are however not caught which indicates that the model can not explain all behaviors. A reduced model works almost as well but of course looses more of the non stiffness behavior. As expected, the model equations can not be solved in real time. The result of the inverted reduced model depends on the flywheel signal. When the signal contains little non stiffness behavior the result is good. An observer model based on the reduced model is suggested and tested in order to estimate the indicated torque from flywheel data. The observer manages to detect errors in the injection.

The demands on heavy duty vehicles is constantly raising with government legislations on CO2 emissions becoming stricter and increasing customer demands. A continuous search for new methods and tools is a crucial element in finding more performance and lower emissions, which are prerequisites for heavy duty vehicles of the future. This thesis is conducted at Scania CV AB and aims at proposing a co-simulation setup which implements the engine management system, EMS, for turbocharger control, into engine simulation models that the company uses to simulate the behaviour of their combustion engines. The EMS software for turbocharger control is modelled in a MATLAB Simulink model and the engine simulation model is modelled in GT-SUITE. The thesis is also suggesting improvements to a turbine model that is modelled within the given EMS software. The results suggest a co-simulation setup that enables the engine simulation models to utilize the EMS software for turbocharger control which thereby enhances their ability to predict engine behaviour. The setup can also be used as a tool during the development process for other part of the EMS and could ease the need for physical engine tests in test cell. The suggested improvements to the turbine model revolves around building a model capturing the aspects of a so called twin scroll turbine and also to implement a better estimation of the turbine efficiency. The improvements to the turbine model ultimately leads to improving the response behaviour of the EMS turbocharger control system.

Active safety systems for road vehicles make a crucial preventive contribution to road safety. In recent years, technological developments and the increasing demand for road safety have resulted in the integration and cooperation of these individual active safety systems. Traction control system (TCS) is one of these individual systems, which is capable of inhibiting wheel-spin during acceleration of the vehicle on slippery surfaces. In this thesis, design methodology and simulation results of a traction control system for four wheeled road vehicles are presented. The objective of the TCS controller is basically to improve directional stability, steer-ability and acceleration performance of vehicle by controlling the wheel slip during acceleration. In this study, the designed traction control system based on fuzzy logic is composed of an engine torque controller and a slip controller. Reference wheel slip values were estimated from the longitudinal acceleration data of the vehicle. Engine torque controller determines the throttle opening angle corresponding to the desired wheel torque, which is determined by a slip controller to track the reference slip signals. The wheel torques delivered by the engine are compensated by brake torques according to the desired wheel torque determined by the slip controller. Performance of the TCS controller was analyzed through several simulations held in MATLAB/Simulink for different road conditions during straight line acceleration and combined acceleration and steering. For simulations, an 8 DOF nonlinear vehicle model with nonlinear tires and a 2 DOF nonlinear engine model were built.

The demand for turbofan engine performance development is high in the military industry. However, to develop the engine, it is necessary to predict its performance, and engine testing is both time-consuming and costly. Therefore, simulation is an effective approach to predicting the engine’s performance. During this thesis, a low bypass ratio turbofan engine is created in the simulation tool Simulink to investigate the engine performance throughout different flight conditions and maneuvers. The engine model is constructed for the future fighter aircraft at SAAB Aeronautics. The development of a design point has received particular attention throughout the work. After that, the development of proven methods for estimating engine performance of other parts of the flight envelope, resulting in increased model fidelity and enabling simulations of the same engine type but under different conditions and flight cases. To summarize, the tests of the engine model are successful under various design characteristics, conditions, and flight cases. In addition, simulations of the performance evaluation of fighter aircraft engines have been accomplished.

A recent development in the design of control system for a jet engine is to use a suitable, fast and accurate model running on board. Development of linear models is particularly important as most engine control designs are based on linear control theory. Engine control performance can be significantly improved by increasing the accuracy of the developed model. Current state-of-the-art is to use piecewise linear models at selected equilibrium conditions for the development of set point controllers, followed by scheduling of resulting controller gains as a function of one or more of the system states. However, arriving at an effective gain scheduler that can accommodate fast transients covering a wide range of operating points can become quite complex and involved, thus resulting in a sacrifice on controller performance for its simplicity. This thesis presents a methodology for developing a control oriented analytical linear model of a jet engine at both equilibrium and off-equilibrium conditions. This scheme requires a nonlinear engine model to run onboard in real time. The off-equilibrium analytical linear model provides improved accuracy and flexibility over the commonly used piecewise linear models developed using numerical perturbations. Linear coefficients are obtained by evaluating, at current conditions, analytical expressions which result from differentiation of simplified nonlinear expressions. Residualization of the fast dynamics states are utilized since the fast dynamics are typically outside of the primary control bandwidth. Analytical expressions based on the physics of the aerothermodynamic processes of a gas turbine engine facilitate a systematic approach to the analysis and synthesis of model based controllers. In addition, the use of analytical expressions reduces the computational effort, enabling linearization in real time at both equilibrium and off-equilibrium conditions for a more accurate capture of system dynamics during aggressive transient maneuvers. The methodology is formulated and applied to a separate flow twin-spool turbofan engine model in the Numerical Propulsion System Simulation (NPSS) platform. The fidelity of linear model is examined by validating against a detailed nonlinear engine model using time domain response, the normalized additive uncertainty and the nu-gap metric. The effects of each simplifying assumptions, which are crucial to the linear model development, on the fidelity of the linear model are analyzed in detail. A case study is performed to investigate the case when the current state (including both slow and fast states) of the system is not readily available from the nonlinear simulation model. Also, a simple model based control is used to illustrate benefits of using the proposed modeling approach.