Flexible and robust control of heavy duty diesel engine airpath using data driven disturbance observers and GPR models

Diesel engine airpath control is crucial for modern engine development due to increasingly stringent emission regulations. This thesis aims to develop and validate a exible and robust control approach to this problem for speci cally heavy-duty engines. It focuses on estimation and control algorithms that are implementable to the current and next generation commercial electronic control units (ECU). To this end, targeting the control units in service, a data driven disturbance observer (DOB) is developed and applied for mass air ow (MAF) and manifold absolute pressure (MAP) tracking control via exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) valve and variable geometry turbine (VGT) vane. Its performance bene ts are demonstrated on the physical engine model for concept evaluation. The proposed DOB integrated with a discrete-time sliding mode controller is applied to the serial level engine control unit. Real engine performance is validated with the legal emission test cycle (WHTC - World Harmonized Transient Cycle) for heavy-duty engines and comparison with a commercially available controller is performed, and far better tracking results are obtained. Further studies are conducted in order to utilize capabilities of the next generation control units. Gaussian process regression (GPR) models are popular in automotive industry especially for emissions modeling but have not found widespread applications in airpath control yet. This thesis presents a GPR modeling of diesel engine airpath components as well as controller designs and their applications based on the developed models. Proposed GPR based feedforward and feedback controllers are validated with available physical engine models and the results have been very promisin

Model predictive emissions control of a diesel engine airpath: Design and experimental evaluation

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163480/2/rnc5188.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163480/1/rnc5188_am.pd

Model Predictive Control of Diesel Fuel Consumption and On-road Emission Constraints

Diesel engines continue to be an important powerplant in heavy-duty trucks due to their inherent advantages such as range, robustness to operating conditions, and wide range of torque deliverability. With the introduction of on-road-focused emission regulations, one would explore an adaptive calibration scheme, where the fuel efficiency is maximized subject to tailpipe NOx emission constraint. Nowadays, the engine calibration setpoints are a function of speed and load calibrated offline, considering various driving profiles and certified on a specific drive cycle. This thesis explores adjusting engine setpoints online to enable future integration with the trip ahead and a preview of the load affecting the thermal and, thus, the aftertreatment conditions. Recognizing that the engine-out NOx increases by more than 50 % for a corresponding decrease of 1 % in brake-specific fuel consumption (BSFC). It is essential to control the engine at the low BSFC conditions only when the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) is predicted to operate efficiently. Similarly, the engine operation should support the warm-up of the SCR and avoid the generation of NOx when the SCR cannot convert it. In this thesis, a hierarchical predictive engine and aftertreatment control architecture is designed to alter the engine setpoints to achieve the best fuel economy while the SCR effectively reduces the corresponding increase in engine-out NOx. The advantage of the model predictive controller in handling time-delayed systems addresses the slow thermo-chemical dynamics of SCR. To implement this controller in real-time, physics-based engine airpath, engine-out NOx emission, and aftertreatment thermodynamic models are developed. The hierarchical controller architecture consists of a supervisory thermal management controller with a long prediction horizon and an air path controller with short prediction horizon. The supervisory controller aims to improve and maintain the aftertreatment temperature above a set catalyst light-off temperature with intake manifold pressure and the start of injection (SOI) as control variables. After the aftertreatment warm-up, the supervisory controller balances and initiates transitions to “fuel save” mode and provides fuel-optimal references. The air path controller tracks the references dictated by the supervisory controller while it also controls the transient engine-out NOx by compensating the reference SOI. The sub-components of this hierarchical controller are experimentally validated for real-time feasibility and prediction capability. The overall architecture is validated in a software-in-the-loop (SIL) simulation environment, and results show improved fuel economy with reduced tailpipePHDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169815/1/saravan_1.pd

Control and Estimation Oriented Model Order Reduction for Linear and Nonlinear Systems

Optimization based controls are advantageous in meeting stringent performance requirements and accommodating constraints. Although computers are becoming more powerful, solving optimization problems in real-time remains an obstacle because of associated computational complexity. Research efforts to address real-time optimization with limited computational power have intensified over the last decade, and one direction that has shown some success is model order reduction. This dissertation contains a collection of results relating to open- and closed-loop reduction techniques for large scale unconstrained linear descriptor systems, constrained linear systems, and nonlinear systems. For unconstrained linear descriptor systems, this dissertation develops novel gramian and Riccati solution approximation techniques. The gramian approximation is used for an open-loop reduction technique following that of balanced truncation proposed by (Moore, 1981) for ordinary linear systems and (Stykel, 2004) for linear descriptor systems. The Riccati solution is used to generalize the Linear Quadratic Gaussian balanced truncation (LQGBT) of (Verriest, 1981) and (Jonckheere and Silverman, 1983). These are applied to an electric machine model to reduce the number of states from $>$100000 to 8 while improving accuracy over the state-of-the-art modal truncation of (Zhou, 2015) for the purpose of condition monitoring. Furthermore, a link between unconstrained model predictive control (MPC) with a terminal penalty and LQG of a linear system is noted, suggesting an LQGBT reduced model as a natural model for reduced MPC design. The efficacy of such a reduced controller is demonstrated by the real-time control of a diesel airpath. Model reduction generally introduces modeling errors, and controlling a constrained plant subject to modeling errors falls squarely into robust control. A standard assumption of robust control is that inputs/states/outputs are constrained by convex sets, and these sets are ``tightened'' for robust constraint satisfaction. However, robust control is often overly conservative, and resulting control strategies cannot take advantage of the true admissible sets. A new reduction problem is proposed that considers the reduced order model accuracy and constraint conservativeness. A constant tube methodology for reduced order constrained MPC is presented, and the proposed reduced order model is found to decrease the constraint conservativeness of the reduced order MPC law compared to reduced order models obtained by gramian and LQG reductions. For nonlinear systems, a reformulation of the empirical gramians of (Lall et al., 1999) and (Hahn et al., 2003) into simpler, yet more general forms is provided. The modified definitions are used in the balanced truncation of a nonlinear diesel airpath model, and the reduced order model is used to design a reduced MPC law for tracking control. Further exploiting the link between the gramian and Riccati solution for linear systems, the new empirical gramian formulation is extended to obtain empirical Riccati covariance matrices used for closed-loop model order reduction of a nonlinear system. Balanced truncation using the empirical Riccati covariance matrices is demonstrated to result in a closer-to-optimal nonlinear compensator than the previous balanced truncation techniques discussed in the dissertation.PHDNaval Architecture & Marine EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/140839/1/riboch_1.pd

Predicting NOx emissions in diesel engines via sigmoid NARX models using a new experiment design for combustion identification

Diesel engines are still widely used in heavy-duty engine industry because of their high energy conversion efficiency. In recent decades, governmental institutions limit the maximum acceptable hazardous emissions of diesel engines by stringent international regulations, which enforces engine manufacturers to find a solution for reducing the emissions while keeping the power requirements. A reliable model of the diesel engine combustion process can be quite useful to search for the best engine operating conditions. In this study, nonlinear modeling of a heavy-duty diesel engine NOx emission formation is presented. As a new experiment design, air-path and fuel-path input channels were excited by chirp signals where the frequency profile of each channel is different in terms of the number and the direction of the sweeps. This method is proposed as an alternative to the steady-state experiment design based modeling approach to substantially reduce testing time and improve modeling accuracy in transient operating conditions. Sigmoid based nonlinear autoregressive with exogenous input (NARX) model is employed to predict NOx emissions with given input set under both steady-state and transient cycles. Models for different values of parameters are generated to analyze the sensitivity to parameter changes and a parameter selection method using an easy-to-interpret map is proposed to find the best modeling parameters. Experimental results show that the steady-state and the transient validation accuracies for the majority of the obtained models are higher than 80% and 70%, respectively

Deep Learning based Model Predictive Control for Compression Ignition Engines

Machine learning (ML) and a nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) are used in this paper to minimize the emissions and fuel consumption of a compression ignition engine. In this work machine learning is applied in two methods. In the first application, ML is used to identify a model for implementation in model predictive control optimization problems. In the second application, ML is used as a replacement of the NMPC where the ML controller learns the optimal control action by imitating or mimicking the behavior of the model predictive controller. In this study, a deep recurrent neural network including long-short term memory (LSTM) layers are used to model the emissions and performance of an industrial 4.5 liter 4-cylinder Cummins diesel engine. This model is then used for model predictive controller implementation. Then, a deep learning scheme is deployed to clone the behavior of the developed controller. In the LSTM integration, a novel scheme is used by augmenting hidden and cell states of the network in an NMPC optimization problem. The developed LSTM-NMPC and the imitative NMPC are compared with the Cummins calibrated Engine Control Unit (ECU) model in an experimentally validated engine simulation platform. Results show a significant reduction in Nitrogen Oxides (\nox) emissions and a slight decrease in the injected fuel quantity while maintaining the same load. In addition, the imitative NMPC has a similar performance as the NMPC but with a two orders of magnitude reduction of the computation time.Comment: Submitted to Control engineering Practice (Submission date: March 9, 2022) Revised version (Submission date: June 18, 2022) Accepted on July 30, 202

Structured Hammerstein-Wiener Model Learning for Model Predictive Control

This paper aims to improve the reliability of optimal control using models constructed by machine learning methods. Optimal control problems based on such models are generally non-convex and difficult to solve online. In this paper, we propose a model that combines the Hammerstein-Wiener model with input convex neural networks, which have recently been proposed in the field of machine learning. An important feature of the proposed model is that resulting optimal control problems are effectively solvable exploiting their convexity and partial linearity while retaining flexible modeling ability. The practical usefulness of the method is examined through its application to the modeling and control of an engine airpath system.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Air path and combustion controls coordination in diesel engine

The tightening of the diesel pollutants emissions regulations has made the performances obtainable from steady-state map controls, commonly employed in Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) management, unsatisfactory. To overcome these performance limitations, control systems have to cope with the engine transient operation conditions, coupling between its subsystem dynamics, and the trade-off between different requirements to efficiently manage the engine. The work demonstrates the deployment of a reference generator that coordinates the air path and combustion control systems of a turbocharged diesel engine for heavy-duty applications. The control system coordinator is based on neural networks and allows to exploit the best performance of the two control systems. The key idea is to generate air path targets, intake O2 concentration and Intake MAnifold Pressure (IMAP), coherent with the ones of the combustion control system, engine load and engine-out Nitrogen Oxides (NOx). In this way, the air path control system provides the global conditions for the correct functioning of the engine, while, in cooperation, the combustion control will react to fast changes in the engine operating state and compensate for the remaining deviations with respect to load and NOx targets. Reference generator networks are suitable for further real-time implementation on rapid-prototyping hardware and their performance was overall good