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The performance of a spark ignition engine strongly depends on the phase of the combustion process with respect to piston motion, and hence on the spark advance; this fundamental parameter is actually controlled in open-loop by means of maps drawn up on the test bench and stored in the Electronic Control Unit (ECU). Bi-fuel engines (e.g. running either on gasoline or on natural gas) require a double mapping process in order to obtain a spark timing map for each of the fuels. This map based open-loop control however does not assure to run the engine always with the best spark timing, which can be influenced by many factors, like ambient condition of pressure, temperature and humidity, fuel properties, engine wear. A feedback control instead can maintain the spark advance at its optimal value apart from operative and boundary conditions, so as to gain the best performance (or minimum fuel consumption).

Natural gas represents today maybe the most valid alternative to conventional fuels for road vehicles propulsion. The main constituent of natural gas, methane, is characterized by a high autoignition temperature, which makes the fuel highly resistant to knocking: this allows a considerable downsizing of the engine by means of supercharging even under high compression ratio. Starting from these considerations, the authors realized a thermodynamic model of a 4-cilynder s.i. engine for the prevision of in-cylinder pressure, employing a two-zone approach for the combustion and adding sub-models to account for gas properties change and knocking occurrence. An extensive experimental campaign has been carried out on the test bed, equipped with a naturally aspirated bi-fuel s.i. engine (i.e. an engine which can run either with gasoline or with compressed natural gas), so as to set the model constants to the best matching values.