Modeling and control of Rankine based waste heat recovery systems for heavy duty trucks

Abstract This paper presents a control oriented model development for waste heat recovery Rankine based control systems in heavy duty trucks. Waste heat recovery systems, such as Rankine cycle, are promising solutions to improve the fuel efficiency of heavy duty engines. Due to the highly transient operating conditions, improving the control strategy of those systems is an important step to their integration into a vehicle. The system considered here is recovering heat from both EGR and exhaust in a serial arrangement and use a mixture of water and ethanol as working fluid. The paper focuses on a comparison of a classical PID controller which is the state of the art in the automotive industry and a nonlinear model based controller in a simulation environment. The nonlinear model based controller shows better performance than the PID one and ensures safe operation of the system.