Quantitative feedback design of air and boost pressure control system for turbocharged diesel engines

For modern diesel engines, variable geometry turbocharger (VGT) is used to boost engine power output. In addition, exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) is utilized to reduce engine out NO x emission. To realize these functions, a multivariable control system needs to control both VGT and EGR valve to deliver desired intake manifold (or boost) pressure, and desired EGR flow rate. This two-input and two-output system is nonlinear with cross-couplings between the boost and EGR responses to the input actuators, the system parameters are varying with different engine operating conditions. This paper proposes a closed loop design of a multivariable VGT/EGR control system for a turbocharged diesel engine. The control system is synthesized based on quantitative feedback theory to maintain robust stability and performance via sequential MIMO loop shaping in the frequency domain. Experiment results are included from a turbocharged diesel engine to show the effectiveness of the proposed control design. ► A robust design of EGR and boosting control system for internal combustion engines. ► Control architecture with MIMO decoupling and gain scheduling for nonlinear systems. ► Quantitative feedback design to guarantee gain and phase margins for MIMO systems. ► Experiment validation of diesel engines with desired stability and performance robustness.