Design of a Rapid Prototyping Engine Management System for Development of Combustion Feedback Control Technology 2006-01-0611

Combustion feedback using cylinder pressure sensors, ion current sensors or alternative sensing techniques is actively under investigation by the automotive industry to meet future legislative emissions requirements. One of the drawbacks of many rapid prototyping engine management systems is their available analog interfaces, often limited to 10-12 bits with limited bandwidth, sampling rate and very simple anti-aliasing filters. Processing cylinder pressure or other combustion feedback sensors requires higher precision, wider bandwidths and more processing power than is typically available. For these reasons, Ricardo in collaboration with GM Research has developed a custom, high precision analog input subsystem for the rCube rapid prototyping control system that is specifically targeted at development of combustion feedback control systems. Up to 32 channels of high precision, wide bandwidth analog signals are pre-processed by a Xilinx Spartan III Field Programmable Gate Array before being transferred via dual port memory to a high performance PowerPC for further processing. The design enables that hardware and software requirements for combustion feedback systems to be investigated without effective limitations of the analog system and processing power. Requirement specifications for production systems can therefore be developed in a systematic manner. Rapid prototyping of control algorithms can be performed in either ASCET-SD or Simulink. This paper describes the hardware design and implementation of the rapid prototyping system for investigation of combustion feedback control technology for both gasoline and diesel systems.