Reconstruction of gasoline engine in-cylinder pressures using recurrent neural networks

Knowledge of the pressure inside the combustion chamber of a gasoline engine would provide very useful information regarding the quality and consistency of combustion and allow significant improvements in its control, leading to improved efficiency and refinement. While measurement using incylinder pressure transducers is common in laboratory tests, their use in production engines is very limited due to cost and durability constraints. This thesis seeks to exploit the time series prediction capabilities of recurrent neural networks in order to build an inverse model accepting crankshaft kinematics or cylinder block vibrations as inputs for the reconstruction of in-cylinder pressures. Success in this endeavour would provide information to drive a real time combustion control strategy using only sensors already commonly installed on production engines. A reference data set was acquired from a prototype Ford in-line 3 cylinder direct injected, spark ignited gasoline engine of 1.125 litre swept volume. Data acquired concentrated on low speed (1000-2000 rev/min), low load (10-30 Nm brake torque) test conditions. The experimental work undertaken is described in detail, along with the signal processing requirements to treat the data prior to presentation to a neural network. The primary problem then addressed is the reliable, efficient training of a recurrent neural network to result in an inverse model capable of predicting cylinder pressures from data not seen during the training phase, this unseen data includes examples from speed and load ranges other than those in the training case. The specific recurrent network architecture investigated is the non-linear autoregressive with exogenous inputs (NARX) structure. Teacher forced training is investigated using the reference engine data set before a state of the art recurrent training method (Robust Adaptive Gradient Descent – RAGD) is implemented and the influence of the various parameters surrounding input vectors, network structure and training algorithm are investigated. Optimum parameters for data, structure and training algorithm are identified

Smart Energy Management for Smart Grids

This book is a contribution from the authors, to share solutions for a better and sustainable power grid. Renewable energy, smart grid security and smart energy management are the main topics discussed in this book

Proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress

Published proceedings of the 2018 Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering (CSME) International Congress, hosted by York University, 27-30 May 2018