Optimal Control of Diesel Engines: Numerical Methods, Applications, and Experimental Validation

In response to the increasingly stringent emission regulations and a demand for ever lower fuel consumption, diesel engines have become complex systems. The exploitation of any leftover potential during transient operation is crucial. However, even an experienced calibration engineer cannot conceive all the dynamic cross couplings between the many actuators. Therefore, a highly iterative procedure is required to obtain a single engine calibration, which in turn causes a high demand for test-bench time. Physics-based mathematical models and a dynamic optimisation are the tools to alleviate this dilemma. This paper presents the methods required to implement such an approach. The optimisation-oriented modelling of diesel engines is summarised, and the numerical methods required to solve the corresponding large-scale optimal control problems are presented. The resulting optimal control input trajectories over long driving profiles are shown to provide enough information to allow conclusions to be drawn for causal control strategies. Ways of utilising this data are illustrated, which indicate that a fully automated dynamic calibration of the engine control unit is conceivable. An experimental validation demonstrates the meaningfulness of these results. The measurement results show that the optimisation predicts the reduction of the fuel consumption and the cumulative pollutant emissions with a relative error of around 10% on highly transient driving cycles.