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Due to the recent anti-pollution policies, the performance increase in Spark Ignition (SI) engines is currently under the focus of automotive manufacturers. This trend drives control systems designers to investigate accurate solutions and build more sophisticated algorithms to increase the efficiency of this kind of engines. The development of a control strategy is composed of several phases and steps, and the first part of such process is typically spent in defining and investigating the logic of the strategy. During this phase it is often useful to have a light engine simulator, which allows to have robust synthetic combustion data with a low calibration and computational effort. In the first part of this paper, a description of the control-oriented ANalytical Engine SIMulator (ANESIM) is carried out.

Water Injection (WI) has become a key technology for increasing combustion efficiency in modern GDI turbocharged engines. In fact, the addition of water mitigates significantly the occurrence of knock, reduces exhaust gas temperatures, and opens the possibility to reach optimum heat release phasing even at high load. This work presents the latest development of a model-based WI controller, and its experimental validation on a GDI TC engine. The controller is based on a novel approach that involves an analytic combustion model to define the spark advance (SA) required to reach a combustion phase target, considering injected water mass effects. The calibration and experimental validation of the proposed controller is shown in detail in the paper.

This paper shows the influence of different battery charge management strategies on the fuel economy of a hybrid parallel axle-split vehicle in a real driving scenario, for a vehicle control system that has the additional possibility to split the torque between front and rear axles. The first section regards the validation of a self-developed Model in the Loop (MiL) environment of a P1-P4 plug-in hybrid electric car, using experimental data of a New European Driving Cycle test. In its original version, which is implemented on-board the vehicle, the energy management supervisor implements a heuristic, or rule-based, Energy Management Strategy (EMS). During this project, a different EMS has been developed, consisting of a sub-optimal control scheme called Equivalent Consumption Minimization Strategy (ECMS), explained in detail in the second section.

Measurement of particle number was introduced in the Euro 5/6 light duty vehicle emissions regulation. Due to the complex nature of combustion exhaust particles, and to transportation, transformation and deposition mechanisms, such type of measurement is particularly complex, and regression analysis is commonly used for the comparison of different measurement systems. This paper compares various commercial instruments, developing a correlation analysis focused on PN (Particle Number) measurement, and isolating the factors that mainly influence each measuring method. In particular, the experimental activity has been conducted to allow critical comparisons between measurement techniques that are imposed by current regulations and instruments that can be used also on the test cell. The paper presents the main results obtained by analyzing instruments based on different physical principles, and the effects of different sampling locations and different operating parameters.

The paper presents the development and real-time implementation of a combustion control system based on optimal management of multiple spark discharge events, in order to increase combustion stability, reduce pollutant emissions and fuel consumption, and avoid partial or missing combustion cycles. The proposed approach has been developed as a cost-effective solution to several combustion-related issues that affect Gasoline Direct Injection (GDI) engines during cold start and part load operation. The problem of optimizing combustion efficiency and improving its stability during such operating modes is even more critical for high performance engines, which are designed to maximize charge efficiency especially at medium-high engine speeds.

The paper presents the main results of a research activity focused on the analysis, development, and real time implementation of a closed-loop, individual cylinder combustion control system, based on ion sensing technology. The innovative features of the proposed control system consist of extracting combustion quality related information from the ion current signal, and of using such information, together with pre-defined look-up-tables, for feedback control of the spark advance throughout the entire engine operating range. In particular, the ion current signal processing algorithm that is carried out in real-time, initially determines whether knocking is affecting or not the actual combustion process.

The paper presents the development of a methodology for detecting the misfire event using the time-frequency analysis of the instantaneous engine speed signal. The diagnosis of this type of malfunctioning operating condition is enforced by OBD requirements over the whole operating range of the engine, and many different approaches have been developed in the past in order to solve this problem. The novel approach presented here is based on the observation that the misfire causes an impulsive lack of torque acting on the engine crankshaft, and thus it causes the excitation of damped torsional vibrations at frequencies characteristic of the system under study. In order to enlighten the presence of this torsional vibration (and therefore detect the misfire event), information contained in the instantaneous crankshaft speed fluctuations have been processed in the time-frequency domain.

This paper presents the experimental work and the results obtained from the implementation of a transient fuel compensation algorithm for the 6.0-liter V12 high-performance engine that equips the Lamborghini Diablo vehicles. This activity has been carried out as part of an effort aimed at the optimization of the entire fuel injection control system. In the first part of the paper the tests for fuel film compensator identification are presented and discussed. In this phase the experimental work has been conducted in the test cell. An automatic calibration algorithm was developed to identify the well-known fuel film model X and τ parameters, so as to define their maps as a function of engine speed and intake manifold pressure. The influence of engine coolant temperature has been investigated separately; it will be soon presented together with the air dynamics compensation algorithm. In the second part of the paper, the performance of the fuel dynamics compensation algorithm is analyzed.