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Browsing by Subject "Automotive powertrain"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Design and control of fully flexible valve actuation systems for camless engines
    (2012-12) Gillella, Pradeep Kumar
    The motivation to improve the fuel efficiency and reduce emissions of the internal combustion engine comes from the dwindling oil reserves and the increased concerns about climate change. A key step towards realizing these improvements is to introduce flexibilities into the mechanisms used for air and fuel management by replacing the mechanical devices with mechatronic systems. The introduction of fuel injection systems in place of the carburetors resulted in significant improvements due to the additional flexibilities in fuel management. The traditional air management systems use camshaft based mechanisms to actuate the intake/exhaust valves. The benefits offered by fully flexible valve actuation and the limitations of the camshaft based systems motivate the development of a "Camless valve actuation system". Research in this area during the past two decades has led to the development of several concepts. However, the stringent performance requirements to ensure reliable operation and the shortcomings of the previously developed concepts has impeded the widespread deployment of these systems. In this research, we propose to address the problem from two perspectives. A design based solution capable of achieving fully flexible operation using inexpensive components while requiring simplified controllers is first introduced. It is followed by the development of a systematic procedure for optimizing the design of a key component in this system to improve it performance and robustness. The second topic focuses on the implementation aspects of a new control algorithm to enable precise tracking of the engine valve reference profile. The effectiveness of the linear time invariant controllers based on the internal model principle for steady state operation of the engine is leveraged to enable tracking control during engine speed transients by extending the control framework to the time-varying setting. The challenges associated with the time-varying nature of the controller are revealed and the developed solutions help its implementation and validation on experimental hardware. The proposed framework can easily be extended to other engine subsystems as well as other general rotational machinery.
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    Design, control and energy optimization of a rapid-prototyping hybrid powertrain research platform
    (2014-01) Wang, Yu
    This thesis focuses on the architecture design, dynamic modeling and system control of a rapid-prototyping hybrid automotive powertrain research platform and on this basis, conducts a series of research work on the powertrain control and energy/emissions optimization of the hybrid vehicle system. This hybrid powertrain research platform leverages the fast dynamic response of a transient hydrostatic dynamometer to mimic the dynamics of various hybrid power sources and hybrid architectures and therefore, creates an accurate and highly flexible emulation tool for hybrid powertrain operations. This design will greatly speed up the research progress and reduce the economic cost of the study on various hybrid architectures and control methodologies. The design, control and optimization of this research platform include the detailed research achievements in three levels of the proposed system:1) Low-level system (hydrostatic dynamometer) design and control:with regards to the low-level system, the design, modeling, nonlinear control and experimental validation of a transient hydrostatic dynamometer are accomplished, which provides the hardware ingredient for the research platform and ensures the dynamics emulation capability of the system.2) Mid-level system (hybrid powertrain system) design and control:with regards to the mid-level system, the design and experimental investigation of the multivariable hybrid powertrain control within the hybrid powertrain research platform are achieved; on this basis, the systematic integration and coordination of the energy optimization, hybrid powertrain control, hardware-in-the-loop vehicle simulation and hybrid torque emulation are conducted within a closed-loop architecture.3) High-level system (hybrid energy and emission management) control and optimization:the high-level system design consists of the fuel efficiency optimization ("Stochastic Dynamic Programming - Extremum Seeking" hybrid energy management strategy) and transient emission optimization (Two-Mode hybrid energy management strategy), which are not only the advanced studies in the core area of the hybrid powertrain technology development, but also can be considered as the functionality demonstrations of the designed hybrid powertrain research platform.