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Complexity and nonlinearity of engines makes precise first principle engine models often difficult to obtain, as for instance for emissions. System identification is a well known possible alternative, successfully used in several automotive applications. In most cases system identification is concerned with the estimation of the unknown parameters of a known set of equations. Unfortunately, for many engine subsystems, there is no sufficiently precise or real time suitable model. This paper presents a sequential algorithm which allows to derive real time suitable models on line by a combination of model structure hypothesis of increasing complexity and an associated optimal input design and selection process. This paper introduces the method and shows its use both for a rather simple and a very difficult engine identification task, a dynamical model of the airpath of a Diesel engine and a dynamical model of nitrogen oxides and particulate matter.

Nitrogen oxide (NOx) sensing is required both for on-board diagnosis and optimal selective catalytic reduction (SCR)-catalyst control in heavy duty diesel engines. This can be accomplished either by physical solid-state sensors, or by so-called virtual sensors, which estimate the value of the target quantity using other states by means of a model. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages. This paper resumes the derivation and the identification of a virtual sensor based on a polynomial structure and optimal experimental design methods and compares its performance to the one of a production physical solid state sensor. The virtual sensor is compared with a commercially available solid-state sensor in terms of accuracy (stationary as well as dynamic) and operation limits.

Although the application of cylinder pressure sensors to gain insight into the combustion process is not a novel topic itself, the recent availability of inexpensive in-cylinder pressure sensors has again prompted an upcoming interest for the utilization of the cylinder pressure signal within engine control and monitoring. Besides the use of the in-cylinder pressure signal for combustion analysis and control the information can also be used to determine related quantities in the exhaust or intake manifold. Within this work two different methods to estimate the pressure inside the exhaust manifold are proposed and compared. In contrary to first principle based approaches, which may require time extensive parameterization, alternative data driven approaches were pursued. In the first method a Principle Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to extract the cylinder pressure information and combined with a polynomial model approach.

Advanced driver assistance systems like cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) are designed to exploit information provided by vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and/or infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) communication systems to achieve desired objectives such as safety, traffic fluidity or fuel economy. In a day to day traffic scenario, the presence of unknown disturbances complicates achieving these objectives. In particular, CACC benefits in terms of fuel economy require the prediction of the behavior of a preceding vehicle during a finite time horizon. This paper suggests an estimation method based on actual and past inter-vehicle distance data as well as on traffic and upcoming traffic lights. This information is used to train a set of nonlinear, autoregressive (NARX) models. Two scenarios are investigated, one of them assumes a V2V communication with the predecessor, the other uses only data acquired by on-board vehicle sensors.

Modern cars feature a variety of different driving assistance systems, which aim to improve driving comfort and safety as well as fuel consumption. Due to the technical advances and the possibility to consider vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies have received significant attention from both research and industrial communities. The performance of such systems can be enhanced if the future velocity of the surrounding traffic can be predicted. Generally, human driving behavior is a complex process and influenced by several environmental impacts. In this work a stochastic model of the velocity of a preceding vehicle based on the incorporation of available information sources such as V2I, V2V and radar information is presented. The main influences on the velocity prediction considered in this approach are current and previous velocity measurements and traffic light signals.

At the moment, no equipment is available for fast measurements of particulate matter (PM) from production CI engines, especially during transients. Against this background, virtual sensors may be an option, provided their precision can be validated. This paper presents a new approach to estimate PM emission based only on in-cylinder pressure data. To this end, an in-cylinder pressure trace is measured with a high resolution (0.5 CAD) and every trace is divided into 8 segments according to critical cylinder events (e.g. opening of the valves or the beginning of injection). A piecewise principle component analysis (PCA) is used to compress the information. This information is then used for PM estimation via a second order polynomial model structure. The key element is the separate use of pressure trace information before and during the early stages of combustion. The model is parameterized by steady points and transient experiments which include parts of the FTP and the NEDC.

Virtual testing of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) using a simulation environment provides great potential in reducing real world testing and therefore currently much effort is spent on the development of such tools. This work proposes a simulation and hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) framework, which helps to create a virtual test environment for ADAS based on real world test drive. The idea is to reproduce environmental conditions obtained on a test drive within a simulation environment. For this purpose, a production standard BMW 320d is equipped with a radar sensor to capture surrounding traffic objects and used as vehicle for test drives. Post processing of recorded GPS raw data from the navigation system using an open source map service and the radar data allows an exact reproduction of the driven road including other traffic participants.

Abatement and control of emissions from passenger car combustion engines have been in the focus for a long time. Nevertheless, to address upcoming real-world driving emission targets, knowledge of current engine emissions is crucial. Still, adequate sensors for transient emissions are seldom available in production engines. One way to target this issue is by applying virtual sensors which utilize available sensor information in an engine control unit (ECU) and provide estimates of the not measured emissions. For real-world application it is important that the virtual sensor has low complexity and works under varying conditions. Naturally, the choice of suitable inputs from all available candidates will have a strong impact on these factors. In this work a method to set up virtual sensors by means of design of experiments (DOE) and iterative identification of polynomial models is augmented with a novel input candidate selection strategy.

Due to the advancements in passenger car Diesel engine design, the contribution of transient emission spikes has become an important fraction of the total emissions during the standardized test cycles, hence the interest of this work on dynamical engine operation, in particular on the improvement of NOX and PM emissions. This paper proposes to use a UEGO sensor (universal exhaust gas oxygen sensor) in the upstream of the turbine in combination with a Kalman filter to estimate the target quantities, namely in-cylinder oxygen concentration before and after combustion. This information is used to define the fuel injection as well as the values of the air path actuators. Test bench measurements with a production Diesel engine are presented, where the oxygen based approach is compared to the standard calibration during a fast load increase. It is shown that the torque response could be maintained while NOX as well as PM emission peaks were reduced significantly.

NOx and PM are the critical emissions to meet the legislation limits for diesel engines. Often a value for these emissions is needed online for on-board diagnostics, engine control, exhaust aftertreatment control, model-based controller design or model-in-the-loop simulations. Besides the obvious method of measuring these emissions, a sensible alternative is to estimate them with virtual sensors. A lot of literature can be found presenting different modeling approaches for NOx emissions. Some are very close to the physics and the chemical reactions taking place inside the combustion chamber, others are only given by adapting general functions to measurement data. Hence, generally speaking, there is not a certain method which is seen as the solution for modeling emissions. Finding the best model approach is not straightforward and depends on the model application, the available measurement channels and the available data set for calibration.

Two-wheel vehicles are becoming continuously more important in Europe, but their spread is accompanied by an increase in security concerns due a number of reasons. These include stability problems during braking, and in particular curve braking, which is much more critical than in 4-wheel vehicles. These stability problems are strongly influenced by the behavior of the driver, in particular by his braking and steering activity. In this work we present a curve-safe ABS control, and analyze the role of the driver by a simulation model. It turns out that the demands on the driver in terms of stability control vary strongly with the braking behavior.

Today’s racing motorcycles can provide engine torques higher than the rear tire can transfer to the road. In motorcycle applications, rear wheel torque control can be critical not only for performance, but also for safety, especially in or out of curves. While most drivers can achieve rather good results in handling this high torque on a straight road, the same is not true during cornering. In this paper we present a strategy for traction control which enforces safety while keeping high acceleration even for large roll angles. The proposed control strategy is tested on a motorcycle simulator and performance could be shown during different demonstrative maneuvers.

Emission abatement is one of the main targets in engine development and design today. Modern turbocharged CRDI Diesel engines with variable turbine geometry (VTG) and exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) provide new degrees of freedom for air path control with enormous effects on emissions. Exploiting these degrees of freedom usually involves a huge calibration work, as sensors are available only for few quantities and dynamical models are mostly not available, so feedback or model based optimization is hardly possible. This paper presents a time efficient data based strategy to obtain such models yielding an accurate as well as robust emission model for nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) by means of design of experiment. The model output is generated by smoothly switching between local models, representing different engine operating points. An adapted D-optimal design of experiments strategy provides optimal data for model identification.

Active control of engine-cooling systems over the full range of operating conditions including warm-up, peak-load, and part-load conditions is a fundamental requirement for today's advanced thermal management systems. The controllable Variable Flow (CVF) cooling system described herein combines efficient hydrodynamic performance with modulated output and flow control. Conventional hydrodynamic layouts for engine-cooling pumps are based on a uniform spin-free fluid flow into the impeller. This CVF system introduces an upstream pre-swirl to the flow thus changing the pump output, its magnitude is controlled in response to the varying heat rejection requirement thus providing efficient cooling on demand, for all operating conditions. The underlying principles, development test results, and the benefits for both gasoline and diesel engine cooling systems are presented and explained.

Transient emission peaks have become an important fraction of the total emissions during the standardized test cycles for passenger car Diesel engines. This paper is concerned with their reduction, in particular for nitric oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) emissions, by online optimization. It is based on a former work [1] in which alternative target quantities for engine control were proposed, namely in-cylinder oxygen concentrations before (O2,BC) and after combustion (O2,AC). A generic nonlinear optimization is applied to provide a systematic determination for the optimal trajectories of these oxygen target quantities during a transient torque maneuver. The proposed method was implemented on a dynamic engine test bed using a production passenger car Diesel engine for the objective function evaluation. Torque response could be maintained unchanged while NOx as well as PM emission peaks were reduced significantly.

Transient emission peaks have become an important fraction of the total emissions during the standardized test cycles for passenger car Diesel engines. This paper is concerned with their reduction, in particular of nitric oxides (NOx) and particulate matter (PM) emissions, by online receding horizon optimal control. It is based on former works in which alternative target quantities for engine control were proposed, namely in-cylinder oxygen concentrations before (O2,BC) and after combustion (O2,AC). The actual work is concerned with testing an in-cylinder oxygen concentrations based control in simulation as well as by a real-time implementation on a turbocharged common rail passenger car production Diesel engine. The promising results confirm the choice of these concentrations as sensible control references and the feasibility of a real-time use in a model predictive control implementation.

During transients, engines tend to produce substantially higher peak emissions like soot - the main fraction of particular matter (PM) - which are the longer the more important as the steady state emissions are better controlled. While Diesel particulate filters are normally able to block them, preventing their occurrence would of course be more important. In order to achieve this goal, however, they must be measurable. While for most emissions commercial sensors of sufficient speed and performance are available, the same is not true for PMs, especially for production engines. Against this background, in the last years the possible use of a full stream 50Hz sensor based on Laser Induced Incandescence (LII) was investigated, and the results were very encouraging, showing that the sensor could recognize transient changes undetected by conventional measurement systems (like the AVL Opacimeter) but confirmed by the analysis of combustion.

Modeling the soot emissions of a Diesel engine is a challenge. Although it was part of many works before, it is still not a solved issue and has a substantial potential for improvement. A major problem is the presence of two competing effects during combustion, soot formation and soot oxidation, whereas only the cumulative difference of these effects can be measured in the exhaust. There is a wide consensus that it is sensible to design crank angle resolved models for both effects. Indeed, many authors propose crank angle based soot models which are mostly based on detailed first principles based structures, e.g. spray models, engine process calculations etc. Although these models are appealing from a theoretical point of view, they are all lacking of the required measurement information to validate all the complex model parts. Finally, most parts of the model remain at their assumed values and only a few parameters are used for calibration.

Transient emission peaks have become an important fraction of the total emissions during the standardized test cycles for passenger car Diesel engines. To this end this paper is concerned with the challenge of measuring emissions during transients. The importance of this topic is increasing due to strict regulation on pollutant emissions. Hence, suitably accurate and fast measurement devices for PM emission detection are required. Thus, we present a comparison between different measurement techniques for Particulate matter (PM) emissions from a Diesel engine, in particular during transients. The compared equipments include AVL Micro soot sensor, AVL Opacimeter, Differential mobility spectrometer and Laser induced incandescence. The goal of this paper is to reveal the most accurate device in the sense of sensitivity and dynamics for fast measurements of PM from a Diesel engine.

The control of the engine air system is an essential part for meeting the emission levels of current and upcoming legislation. Up to now different strategies were presented in the literature and also applied on real systems. Starting from simple single-input-single-output structures in combination with feedforward parts leading to advanced multi-input-multi-output approaches. Nevertheless, independent of the used control approach for each of them suitable references are necessary. Although it seems adequate to directly use the emission target quantities in a closed loop air system control, a fast and accurate measurement is seldom available. An alternative is to use intermediate quantities as references, like fresh air mass flow or oxygen concentrations, which represent the state of the air system. However, for control purposes each of these quantities has to be determined, i.e., measured or calculated.