Estimation of Turbine Torque Using an Adaptive Nonlinear Observer for Closed-Loop Control of Vehicle Automatic Transmissions

This paper presents an adaptive sliding observer-based method for the estimation of turbine torque. The estimations of turbine torque can be used in the closed-loop control of vehicle power train for better shift quality. A sliding observer structure including saturation functions and boundary layers is applied to adapt torque converter parameters. The proposed method has been investigated via simulation and laboratory experimental studies. It has been shown via simulation and experiments that the proposed methodology is promising for the estimations of turbine torque since it uses only inexpensive angular velocity measurements and is not sensitive to parametric uncertainties.[PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]