PI-control of an Electrically Actuated Throttle

Abstract: Fast and precise controlled actuators are becoming more and more important in today’s industry. One way of improving the performance of actuators is to go from a pneumatic controlled actuator to an electrically controlled actuator. Electrically controlled actuators are faster, more accurate and have a lower maintenance cost but are more complex and harder to control. In this thesis two methods for controlling an electric actuator is proposed. The actuator is a BLDC driven throttle valve used for controlling the air intake for a diesel engine where a precise amount of air is wanted to maintain optimal combustion in the engine. The proposed control methods are a PI position controller and a cascade controller consisting of three different controllers. In this thesis the model construction and simulation results are presented while hardware implementation and results are presented in another thesis [1]. The results show that the electric controlled throttle meets specific requirements set by Scania for this thesis.