Simple combustion model for a diesel engine with multiple fuel injections

Engine systems must continuously increase their thermal efficiencies and lower their emissions in real operation. To meet these demands, engine systems are increasingly improving their transient performance through control technology. Conventional engine control systems depend on control maps obtained from huge numbers of experiments, which is necessarily limited by the available number of man-hours. These time-consuming control maps are now being replaced by control inputs derived from on-board models. By calculating optimized control inputs in real time using various information, model-based control increases the robustness of advanced combustion technologies such as premixed charge compression ignition and homogeneous charge compression ignition, which use auto-ignition and combustion of air–fuel mixtures. Models also incur relatively low computational loads because the specifications of the engine control unit are lower than those of current smartphones. This article develops a simple diesel combustion model with model-based control of the multiple fuel injections. The model employs the discretized cycle concept based on fundamental thermodynamic equations and comprises simple fuel injection and chemical reaction models. Our control concept aims mainly to decrease the fuel consumption by increasing the thermal efficiency and reduce the combustion noise in real-world operation. The model predicts the peak in-cylinder gas pressure and its timing that minimize the combustion noise and maximize the thermal efficiency, respectively. In an experimental validation of the model, the computed and measured in-cylinder pressures were well matched at each phase under various parameter settings. In addition, the calculation time of the model is sufficiently short for on-board applications. In future, the proposed model will be extended to the design and installation of controllers for engine systems. The control concept and associated problems of this task are also described in this article.