Stringent NOX emission norm for heavy duty vehicles motivates the use of predictive models to reduce emissions of diesel engines by coordinating engine parameters and aftertreatment. In this paper, a physics-based control-oriented NOX model is presented to estimate the feedgas NOX for a diesel engine. This cycle-averaged NOX model is able to capture the impact of all major diesel engine control variables including the fuel injection timing, injection pressure, and injection rate, as well as the effect of cylinder charge dilution and intake pressure on the emissions. The impact of the cylinder charge dilution controlled by the engine exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) in the highly diluted diesel engine of this work is modeled using an adiabatic flame temperature predictor. The model structure is developed such that it can be embedded in an engine control unit without any need for an in-cylinder pressure sensor. In addition, details of this physics-based NOX model are presented along with a step-by-step model parameter identification procedure and experimental validation at both steady-state and transient conditions. Over a complete federal test procedure (FTP) cycle, on a cumulative basis the model prediction was more than 93% accurate.
For heavy-duty diesel engines, NOX emissions reduction is strongly constrained by fuel efficiency. This paper presents a hierarchical model predictive controller (H-MPC) for coordinated control of tailpipe NOX emissions and fuel consumption. The H-MPC uses the separation of slow and fast dynamics that exist in the engine and its aftertreatment system. The controller is synthesized with an architecture in which a high-level MPC uses a longer prediction horizon compared to the low-level predictive controller which tracks the high-level controller command and manages the thermal dynamics of the aftertreatment system. Engine load preview enables the high-level controller to estimate the desired catalyst temperature ahead of time and addresses the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) slow thermal dynamics. Calculated by the high-level controller, the intake manifold pressure, and the start of injection (SOI) crank angle is used as reference trajectories in the low-level controller that regulates fast dynamical behaviors such as engine out NOX emissions. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) validation of this integrated H-MPC on a rapid prototype controller shows that when the SCR catalyst temperature is above light-off temperature (warmed-up condition), the engine operation is shifted to operate with the best fuel economy since the warmed-up SCR can efficiently reduce the engine-out NOX emissions. Results indicate that up to 0.8% benefit in cycle averaged BSFC along with a 13% reduction in tailpipe NOX compared to a stock engine calibration can be achieved with the coordinated engine and aftertreatment system through H-MPC.
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