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In recent years the need for testing, calibration and certification of automotive components and powertrains have increased, partly due to the development of new hybrid concepts. At the same time, the development within electrical drives enables more versatile chassis dynamometer setups with better accuracy at a reduced cost. We are developing a new chassis dynamometer laboratory for vehicle research, aiming at extending a recently commercially available dynamometer, building a new laboratory around it, and applying the resulting facility to some new challenging vehicle research problems. The projects are enabled on one hand by collaboration with the dynamometer manufacturer, and on the other hand on collaboration with automotive industry allowing access to relevant internal information and equipment. The test modes of the chassis dynamometer are under development in a joint collaboration with the manufacturer.

One important area of SI-engine diagnosis is the diagnosis of leakage in the air-intake system. This is because a leakage can cause increased emissions and drivability problems. A method for accurately detecting leaks is presented. The results are developed for a turbo-charged engine but they are also valid for a naturally aspirated SI-engine. The method is based on a physical model of the leaks and includes an estimation of leakage area. By knowing the area, it is possible to reconfigure the control algorithm such that, the effect of the leak on emissions, is suppressed. As small leaks as 2 mm in diameter can be detected and it is possible to distinguish between leakages before or after the throttle. The method is suitable for on-line implementation.

In modern Diesel engines Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and Variable Geometry Turbochargers (VGT) have been introduced to meet the new emission requirements. A control structure that coordinates and handles emission limits and low fuel consumption has been developed. This controller has a set of PID controllers with parameters that need to be tuned. To be able to achieve good performance, an optimization based tuning method is developed and tested. In the optimization the control objectives are captured by a cost function. To aid the tuning a systematic method has been developed for selecting representative and significant transients that excite different modes in the controller. The performance is evaluated on the European Transient Cycle. It is demonstrated how weighting factors in the cost function influence control behavior, and that the proposed tuning method gives a significant improvement in control performance compared to standardized tuning methods for PID controllers.

For a fuel optimal gear shift control, when look ahead information is available, the impact of the automated manual transmission (AMT) gear-shifting process is analyzed. For a standard discrete heavy truck transmission, answers are found on when to shift gears, prior to or when in an uphill slope. The gear-shifting process of a standard AMT is modeled in order to capture the fuel and time aspects of the gear shift. A numerical optimization is performed by dynamic programming, minimizing fuel consumption and time by controlling fuel injection and gear. Since a standard AMT does not have look ahead information, it sometimes gears down unnecessarily and thus gives a significantly higher fuel consumption compared to the optimal control. However, if gearing down is inevitable, the AMT gear-shifting strategy, based on engine thresholds, is well-functioning so that the optimal control only gives marginal additional savings.

By using engine controlled gear shifting, a manual transmission can be automated without using the clutch during the shift event. The main contribution of this paper is a novel extension of the existing system using active handling of driveline resonances. The strategy is based on a model of the transmission torque, which is derived by using experimental data from a heavy truck. A key step is the design of a criterion for a controller that drives the transmission torque to zero with damped resonances and with a control signal realizable by the engine. The proposed solution offers a possibility to optimize the time needed for a gear shift, which is important since the vehicle is free rolling when in gear-shift condition. Furthermore, neutral gear can successfully be engaged also when facing initial driveline oscillations and load disturbances.

Because of legislative regulations like OBDII, on-board diagnosis has gained much interest lately. A model based approach is suggested for the diagnosis of the air intake system of an SI-engine. Important research issues are modeling concepts, residual generation and evaluation, overall performance, and limiting factors. The diagnosis system is based on a non-linear semi-physical model and uses a combination of different residual generation methods. It is capable of detecting and isolating faults in the throttle actuator, throttle sensor, air mass now sensor and manifold pressure sensor. The scheme is experimentally validated on a real production engine.

Spark ignited engines require accurate control of both air and fuel, and one important component in this system is the throttle servo. A non-linear throttle model is built and used for control design. It is shown that the non-linear model-based controller improves the performance compared to a conventional gain scheduled PI controller. Furthermore a method for estimating the load torque that the air flow produces on the throttle shaft is presented.

Present two stroke engines used for hand held power tools must confirm to prevailing emission legislation. A fact is that today the engines have to be run at leaner air fuel setting resulting in less amount of lubrication oil passing through the engine. This lean mixture combined with high mixture trapping efficiency also affects the combustion, raising the overall working temperature of the engine. So to gain more robustness out of these air-cooled power heads one viable route is to use different coatings to take control of tribology and heat management within the two stroke power head. In this paper a first discussion and description of the different coatings and their merits to the air cooled two stroke engine is conducted. Furthermore engine data for the test engine, in this case a 70cc professional chainsaw are presented. The outcome of engine dyno testing of the different coatings are presented and analyzed for further discussion.