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Knock behavior in diesel-dual-fuel (DDF) engine is more complex, more severe, and different than those of traditional engines. We investigate a type of diesel-dual-fuel engines, where CNG is multipoint-injected at the intake ports as main fuel and diesel is directly injected in smaller amount, mainly for ignition purpose, resulting in lower fuel cost. Because of the mixed behaviors between the spark ignited and compression ignited engines, a more sophisticated control system is needed to properly control knock in the DDF engine. In this paper, a novel control system based on fuzzy logic is presented to regulate knock intensity at an appropriate level. The control system comprises a fuzzy controller and a fuzzy decision maker. The fuzzy controller controls several pertaining actuators using rule-base from human experience, while the fuzzy decision maker adapts the magnitude of each actuator action to various operating points.

From our experiences in converting diesel engine into diesel-dual-fuel engine with natural gas as primary fuel, accurate air/fuel ratio control is vital to the high engine performance, good vehicle drivability, and low emissions. Two components enter in calculating the air/fuel ratio, namely, the amount of fresh air and the amount of diesel and natural gas. Throttle and EGR valve are two actuators directly affect the amount of air, and the desired total fuel determines how much fuel should be injected at an instance. As opposed to inactive, fully opened throttle in typical diesel engine, the throttle in diesel-dual-fuel engine is regulated to cover wider range of desired air/fuel ratio. As a result, the problem of controlling the amount of air in diesel-dual-fuel engine becomes that of multi variables in which both throttle and EGR valve are involved. We present a novel algorithm that breaks the multi-variable control problem into two single-variable problems.

Accurate air-fuel ratio control is required for good engine performance and low emission in diesel dual fuel engine. Two actuators directly affect the ratio are the air throttle and the EGR valve. Maximum air throttle opening is favorable to minimize pumping loss, and the EGR valve opening should follow closely the values in a well-tuned map to minimize emission. In the past, the two actuators were either controlled separately or simultaneously to achieve the air-fuel ratio set point without much consideration on the actuators' opening positions. We proposed a logic that alternated between actuating the air throttle and the EGR valve to maintain optimum air throttle opening. Since each actuator was controlled one at a time, the overall control system was simplified, yet any advanced controller could be applied to increase the accuracy of each actuator.

Accurate common-rail pressure control is vital to good engine performance and low emission. Injection strategy of diesel-dual-fuel engine varies more greatly with speed and load than its diesel engine predecessor, and so does the common-rail pressure set point. Along with this swift set point change, other control challenges exist; they are speed-and-load variation, model uncertainty, sensor noise, actuator nonlinearity, and pressure disturbance from injection. Traditional control such as the PID was proved to be only marginally effective because of the swift set point change. We proposed integrating an integrator-augmented sliding-mode control with gain scheduling and feed-forward term. The sliding-mode control has fast action and is low sensitive to model uncertainty and disturbance. The augmented integrator ensures zero steady-state error. The gain scheduling handles the speed-and-load variation. The feed-forward term helps with the actuator nonlinearity.