Estimation of Stability Margins for the Closed-Loop Air Charge Control of an Internal Combustion Engine Using Sinusoidal Disturbances

Abstract: The vehicle industry have for many years improved the design of car motors and iterated the control systems associated with it. The systems have become very complex and hard to understand because of this work process. It is today very difficult to perform evaluations of the engine's performance or components theoretically at Powertrain Engineering Sweden (PES). This thesis proposes a test method to estimate the robustness, in terms of stability margins, of the air charge throttle control loop using measurement data. Alternative test methods are also presented, for example system identification performed with MATLAB's SITB. The proposed test method superimposes a sine wave upon the control signal in a closed loop system. The control signal is measured after it is superimposed and after it have made one round trip around the loop. These two signals is regarded as sine in and sine out. The phase shift and relation in amplitude are estimated from the measurements and the robustness is presented by Bode plots. The method finds the phase shift from the time difference between the zero-crossings of the input- and output signal. The relation in amplitude is found by looking at the total sum of the absolute value sine wave. Extensive testing with different tunings of the P-part of the air charge controller shows that the proposed method correctly identifies if the systems stability margins have become larger or smaller. For nine measurements with different P-tunings it is seen that the magnitude curves stay separate throughout the whole Bode plot. It is also shown that the gain margins are decreasing for every increase in P-value. The overall results and findings in this thesis are promising and can act as a foundation for future thesis' work to come.