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The strategies adopted to control the combustion in Diesel applications play a key role when dealing with current and future requirements of automotive market for Diesel powertrain systems. The traditional “open loop” control approach aims to achieve a desired combustion behaviour by indirect manipulation of the system boundary conditions (e.g. fresh air mass, fuel injection). On the contrary, the direct measurement of the combustion process, e.g. by means of in-cylinder pressure sensor, offers the possibility to achieve the same target “quasi” automatically all over the vehicle lifetime in widely different operating conditions. Beside the traditional combustion control in closed loop (i.e. based on inner torque and/or combustion timing), the exploitation of in-cylinder pressure signal offers a variety of possible further applications, e.g. smart detection of Diesel fuel quality variation, control of combustion noise, modeling engine exhaust emission (e.g. NOx).

The world of diesel is becoming more technically complex due to the increasingly restrictive legislation regarding emissions, fuel consumption, and real driving emissions evaluations (RDE). Simulation provides a mechanism for the investigation and optimization of diesel engine performance, new engine concepts, RDE, and after-treatment design. This can contribute to solve the problems that the restrictive legislation creates. In addition to these generally valid capabilities of simulations, our model development is focused on the mission to use correctly sized models to reduce the usage of resources and make simulation an even more rapid and cost effective method. In this contribution, we present our approach for simulation as an advanced integrated tool capable of answering challenging questions presented by emission and fuel consumption reduction in future legislation frameworks.