The Key Role of the Closed-loop Combustion Control for Exploiting the Potential of Biodiesel in a Modern Diesel Engine for Passenger Car Applications

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 2576-2589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Ciaravino ◽  
Chiara Guido ◽  
Alberto Vassallo ◽  
Carlo Beatrice
Author(s):  
Ponti Fabrizio ◽  
Ravaglioli Vittorio ◽  
Cavina Nicolò ◽  
De Cesare Matteo

The increasing request for pollutant emissions reduction spawned a great deal of research in the field of combustion control and monitoring. As a matter of fact, newly developed low temperature combustion strategies for diesel engines allow obtaining a significant reduction both in particulate matter and NOx emissions, combining the use of high EGR rates with a proper injection strategy. Unfortunately, due to their nature, these innovative combustion strategies are very sensitive to in-cylinder thermal conditions. Therefore, in order to obtain a stable combustion, a closed-loop combustion control methodology is needed. Many works demonstrate that a closed-loop combustion control strategy can be based on real-time analysis of in-cylinder pressure trace that provides important information about the combustion process, such as start of combustion, center of combustion and torque delivered by each cylinder. Nevertheless, cylinder pressure sensors on-board installation is still uncommon, due to problems related to unsatisfactory measurement long term reliability and cost. This paper presents a newly developed approach that allows extracting information about combustion effectiveness through the analysis of engine vibrations. In particular, the developed methodology can be used to obtain an accurate estimation of the indicated quantities of interest combining the information provided by engine speed fluctuations measurement and by the signals coming from acceleration transducers mounted on the engine. This paper also reports the results obtained applying the whole methodology to a light-duty turbocharged common rail diesel engine.


Author(s):  
Ahmed Al-Durra ◽  
Marcello Canova ◽  
Stephen Yurkovich

Cylinder pressure is one of the most important parameters characterizing the combustion process in an internal combustion engine. The recent developments in engine control technologies suggest the use of cylinder pressure as a feedback signal for closed-loop combustion control. However, the sensors measuring in-cylinder pressure are typically subject to noise and offset issues, requiring signal processing methods to be applied to obtain a sufficiently accurate pressure trace. The signal conditioning implies a considerable computational burden, which ultimately limits the use of cylinder pressure sensing to laboratory testing, where the signal can be processed off-line. In order to enable closed-loop combustion control through cylinder pressure feedback, a real-time algorithm that extracts the pressure signal from the in-cylinder sensor is proposed in this study. The algorithm is based on a crank-angle based engine combustion of that predicts the in-cylinder pressure from the definition of a burn rate function. The model is then adapted to model-based estimation by applying an extended Kalman filter in conjunction with a recursive least-squares estimation scheme. The estimator is tested on a high-fidelity diesel engine simulator as well as on experimental data obtained at various operating conditions. The results obtained show the effectiveness of the estimator in reconstructing the cylinder pressure on a crank-angle basis and in rejecting measurement noise and modeling errors. Furthermore, a comparative study with a conventional signal processing method shows the advantage of using the derived estimator, especially in the presence of high signal noise (as frequently happens with low-cost sensors).


Author(s):  
F. Ponti ◽  
V. Ravaglioli ◽  
N. Cavina ◽  
M. De Cesare

The increasing request for pollutant emissions reduction spawned a great deal of research in the field of combustion control and monitoring. As a matter of fact, newly developed low temperature combustion strategies for Diesel engines allow obtaining a significant reduction both in particulate matter and NOx emissions, combining the use of high EGR rates with a proper injection strategy. Unfortunately, due to their nature, these innovative combustion strategies are very sensitive to in-cylinder thermal conditions. Therefore, in order to obtain a stable combustion, a closed-loop combustion control methodology is needed. Many works demonstrate that a closed-loop combustion control strategy can be based on real-time analysis of in-cylinder pressure trace, that provides important information about the combustion process, such as start of combustion, center of combustion and torque delivered by each cylinder. Nevertheless, cylinder pressure sensors on-board installation is still uncommon, due to problems related to unsatisfactory measurement long term reliability and cost. This paper presents a newly developed approach that allows extracting information about combustion effectiveness through the analysis of engine vibrations. In particular, the developed methodology can be used to obtain an accurate estimation of the indicated quantities of interest combining the information provided by engine speed fluctuations measurement and by the signals coming from acceleration transducers mounted on the engine. This paper also reports the results obtained applying the whole methodology to a light-duty turbocharged Common Rail Diesel engine.


2014 ◽  
Vol 77 ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.P. Carlucci ◽  
D. Laforgia ◽  
S. Motz ◽  
R. Saracino ◽  
S.P. Wenzel

Author(s):  
Fabrizio Ponti ◽  
Vittorio Ravaglioli ◽  
Davide Moro ◽  
Matteo De Cesare

Newly developed Diesel engine control strategies are mainly aimed at pollutant emissions reduction, due to the increasing request for engine-out emissions and fuel consumption reduction. In order to reduce engine-out emissions, the development of closed-loop combustion control algorithms has become crucial. Modern closed-loop combustion control strategies are characterized by two main aspects: the use of high EGR rates (the goal being to obtain highly premixed combustions) and the control of the center of combustion. In order to achieve the target center of combustion, conventional combustion control algorithms correct the measured value by varying Main injection timing. It is possible to obtain a further reduction in pollutant emissions through a proper variation of the injection parameters. Modern Diesel engine injection systems allow designing injection patterns with many degrees of freedom, due to the large number of tuneable injection parameters (such as start and duration of each injection). Each injection parameter’s variation causes variations in the whole combustion process and, consequently, in pollutant emissions production. Injection parameters variations have a strong influence on other quantities that are related to combustion process effectiveness, such as noise radiated by the engine. This work presents a methodology that allows real-time evaluating combustion noise on-board a vehicle. The radiated noise can be evaluated through a proper in-cylinder pressure signal processing. Even though in-cylinder pressure sensor on-board installation is still uncommon, it is believed that in-cylinder pressure measurements will be regularly available on-board thanks to the newly developed piezo-resistive sensors. In order to set-up the methodology, several experimental tests have been performed on a 1.3 liter Diesel engine mounted in a test cell. The engine was run, in each operating condition, both activating and deactivating pre-injections, since pre-injections omission usually produces a decrease in pollutant emissions production (especially in particulate matter) and a simultaneous increase in engine noise. The investigation of the correlation between combustion process and engine noise can be used to set up a closed-loop algorithm for optimal combustion control based on engine noise prediction.


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