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In order to increase overall energy efficiency of road vehicles, new systems that are able to recover vehicle's kinetic energy usually lost in dissipating process of frictional braking are being developed. This study was done to look at the effects of integrating Mechanical Flywheel-based Kinetic Energy Recovery System (KERS) into an automotive vehicle. Possible system architectures, due to different connection point of the KERS into the vehicle driveline, were proposed and investigated. Interaction of the system main components (IC engine, vehicle Gearbox, KERS subsystems) was analyzed and explained. In particular, three plots are proposed to introduce a graphical representation that can help the project manager to understand the effect of different parameter values related to the main system components on the overall system behavior during energy transfer from the vehicle to KERS and back.

In modern Diesel engine control strategies the guideline is to perform an efficient combustion control, mainly due to the increasing request to reduce pollutant emissions. Innovative control algorithms for optimal combustion positioning require the on-board evaluation of a large number of quantities. In order to perform closed-loop combustion control, one of the most important parameters to estimate on-board is MFB50, i.e. the angular position in which 50% of fuel mass burned within an engine cycle is reached. Furthermore, MFB50 allows determining the kind of combustion that takes place in the combustion chamber, therefore knowing such quantity is crucial for newly developed low temperature combustion applications (such as HCCI, HCLI, distinguished by very low NOx emissions). The aim of this work is to develop a virtual combustion sensor, that provides MFB50 estimated value as a function of quantities that can be monitored real-time by the Electronic Control Unit (ECU).