<p>Having an engine model that is accurate but not too complicated is desirable when working with on-board diagnosis or engine control. In this thesis a four state mean value model is introduced. To make the model usable in an on-line automotive application it is discrete and simulated with a fixed step size solver. Modelling is done with simplicity as main object. Some simple static models are also presented. </p><p>To validate the model measuring is carried out in a Scania R124LB truck with a 12 liter six-cylinder turbo charged diesel engine. In general, for this relatively simple model, the mean errors must be considered low. The inlet manifold pressure mean error during highway driving is 3.4\%.</p>

<p>Due to stricter emission legislation, there is a need for more efficient control of diesel engines with exhaust gas recirculation(EGR). In particular, it is important to estimate the air/fuel ratio accurately in transients. Therefore a new engine gas flow model has been developed. This model divides the gas into one part for oxygen and one part for inert gases. Based on this model an observer has been designed to estimate the oxygen concentration in the gas going into the engine, which can be used to calculate the air/fuel ratio. This observer can also be used to estimate the intake manifold pressure. The advantage of estimating the pressure, instead of low pass filtering the noisy signal, is that the observer does not cause time delay.</p>

Having an engine model that is accurate but not too complicated is desirable when working with on-board diagnosis or engine control. In this thesis a four state mean value model is introduced. To make the model usable in an on-line automotive application it is discrete and simulated with a fixed step size solver. Modelling is done with simplicity as main object. Some simple static models are also presented. To validate the model measuring is carried out in a Scania R124LB truck with a 12 liter six-cylinder turbo charged diesel engine. In general, for this relatively simple model, the mean errors must be considered low. The inlet manifold pressure mean error during highway driving is 3.4\%.

Due to stricter emission legislation, there is a need for more efficient control of diesel engines with exhaust gas recirculation(EGR). In particular, it is important to estimate the air/fuel ratio accurately in transients. Therefore a new engine gas flow model has been developed. This model divides the gas into one part for oxygen and one part for inert gases. Based on this model an observer has been designed to estimate the oxygen concentration in the gas going into the engine, which can be used to calculate the air/fuel ratio. This observer can also be used to estimate the intake manifold pressure. The advantage of estimating the pressure, instead of low pass filtering the noisy signal, is that the observer does not cause time delay.

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.

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.