Engine knock margin estimation and control in spark ignited vehicles

Venue: Department of Industrial Engineering, Seminar room, via Sommarive 9, Povo - Trento, 10:00 - 11:00

• Giulio Panzani, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Abstract

Engine knock is among the most relevant limiting factors in the improvement of the operation of spark ignited

engines. Knock turns out to have a significant random behavior but the increasing availability of new on-board sensors permits a deeper understanding of its mechanism.

Stochastic control approaches have been recently proposed, but they have limited dynamic performances due to the fact that the feedback statistics is built in real time considering a certain amount of engine cycles.

Thanks to the in-cylinder pressure sensors knock probability model is, using the logistic regression technique.

Thanks to this model a closed loop control of the statistic properties of the knock occurrence can be set, using each engine cycle and thus improving closed-loop dynamic performances.

Two modelling approaches are compared: one relies on well-known physical mechanisms while the second exploits a principal component analysis to extract relevant pressure information, thus reducing the identification

effort and improving the estimation performance. Preliminary results on closed-loop control show the experimental effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Biography

Giulio Panzani was born in Monza (Italy), in 1984. He received the Bachelor and Master of Science cum laude in Mechanical Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano in September 2005 and April 2008, respectively.

In 2012 he earned the Ph.D. in Information engineering (system control specialization) from Politecnico di Milano.

He held post-doc positions at the University of Trento and at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zuerich (ETHZ).

Since April 2015, he is assistant professor at Politecnico di Milano.

His main research interests include the analysis of dynamics, control design and estimation for two (and four) wheeled vehicles and internal combustion engine control.