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The fossil fuel is consumed faster than last century. However, the fossil fuel reserves might be depleted due to its limited resources. Many researchers have started to seek alternative of fossil fuels for vehicles. Biofuels are regarded as a shorten-solution which synthesizes some additive fuel from bio-materials into fossil fuel to reduce fossil fuel consumption and can be applied on original fuel supplying system of vehicles that becomes another advantage. This paper focuses on studying the operation characteristics of using gasohol biofuel in a production motorcycle engine. Engine experiments with various test conditions are designed to investigate the operation characteristics with different concentration of ethanol. The ethanol concentrations considered in this paper include 10%, 20%, 50%, 65%, and 80% by weight, which are then compared with the results from pure gasoline.

This paper develops an engine model for the model-in-the-loop (MIL) and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) application to shorten the time duration and reduce the costs of developing and verifying the engine management system (EMS). The target engine is a 1.0L V-type two cylinder water-cooled spark-ignition engine. The engine model is developed using a so-called modulization method, which includes to: (1) separate the sub-models according to the different physical phenomena; (2) collect the sub-models to establish a library; (3) execute the component modules based on a pre-determined sequence by a more flexible way. The engine model is then applied in MIL structure for testing and verifying the control strategies in the developed EMS. After all strategies are verified, the HIL structure is constructed by a hardware controller and a virtual engine in the xPC target. The execution time-step of engine model is analyzed to keep enough accuracy and numeric stability for real-time simulation.