Exhaust pressure modeling and control on an si engine with vgt

Abstract

For a turbocharged si engine, the exhaust pressure is of high importance for the gas exchange process as well as for the turbine power. It is therefore important to control the exhaust pressure accurately during load transients. This paper presents and evaluates a nonlinear controller for the exhaust pressure in an si engine equipped with a variable geometry turbine. A mapping from the states, inputs, and disturbances to future outputs is formed, and inverting the input/output relation in this mapping gives a control law. The controller, which can be tuned as a pi controller, utilizes a model for the turbine mass flow capturing the flow characteristics over the operating range. This controller is compared to a linear pi controller and a feedback linearization controller. Evaluation is performed using both simulations and measurements on a real engine, showing the superior behavior of the nonlinear controllers over the linear controller for this problem. Moreover, the presented controller achieves almost as good performance as a feedback linearization controller, but with easier tuning and implementation.