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R. Priesner, R. Bauer:
"High Dynamic Control of Hybrid Vehicle Combustion Engine Test Beds";
Talk: International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics, Toronto; 2013-08-08 - 2013-08-09; in: "Proceedings of the International Conference on Mechanical Engineering and Mechatronics 2013", (2013), 8 pages.

In this paper, high dynamic torque control for hybrid vehicle combustion engine test beds is presented and discussed. In hybrid vehicles start-stop behavior is of special importance due to the high frequency at which this maneuver occurs. However, on engine test beds start-stop is difficult to replicate, chiefly because the test bed passes through its first torsional resonance and because of arising actuator constraints. Since classical control methods are ill-equipped to deal with these phenomena, high dynamic torque control based on model predictive control (MPC) is proposed in this contribution. In addition to the much improved control performance brought about by the model based nature of the MPC, it is also possible to account for constraints, such as actuator limits, in the computation of the control variable. The third major benefit of the MPC control scheme is the predictive compensation of disturbances. On the engine test bed, the disturbance is given by the engine combustion torque. Since it is not usually directly measured, a suitable estimation scheme is presented. Besides the torsional resonance in the driveshaft the elastic suspension of the engine is also heavily excited during startup. This necessitates an appropriate frequency weighting on the control variable to keep the oscillations below a desired threshold. Finally, simulations and experimental results achieved on an industrial engine test bed illustrate the efficacy of the proposed control scheme. The controller is very successful in reproducing the desired behavior by almost completely compensating test bed dynamics.