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The fuel heating system has completed a decade of operation in flex fuel vehicles to enable engine start in cold start conditions. Besides its proven-in-use benefits to reliable engine start, some recent studies have shown advantages of heating fuel also with respect to emission reduction, drivability enhancement and fuel economy. These benefits make this system a potential candidate to meet the increasingly demanding requirements of the new Brazilian emission legislation PROCONVE L7/L8. To allow system operation, not only to cold starts but whenever required, it is necessary to evaluate the system behavior under different use cases to determine the new system’s mission profile. Therefore, a multitude of tests is required to collect this data for analysis. However, performing such tests with the actual system can be very costly and time-consuming, due to the high variance of test parameters, such as engine sizes, fuel blends, emission driving cycles, ambient temperature, etc.

In some engine measuring systems, the signal acquisition is synchronized with crank angle, rather than time. This technique is particularly beneficial when dealing with parameters such as incylinder pressure and other combustion analysis data that are closely linked to the engine working cycle. In such system, the crankshaft’s top dead center triggers the start of an acquisition with periods of varying time duration, which depends on engine speed [1]. However, there are scenarios where these very signals must be analyzed along with signals acquired with time synchronization. This is the case, for example, of engine knocking calibration, in which combustion data should be linked with injection, ignition, and other engine parameters, which are time-based. Moreover, most used signal processing algorithms are conceived for uniform sampling.

The first generation of heated cold start systems for flex fuel vehicles in Brazil were launched in 2009 and have solved most of the issues around the former gasoline sub-tank concept. This new technological approach focused on concerns like the user experience by having the need to fulfill the sub-tank, on complains related to possible old gasoline left inside, in the complexity of the electro mechanic nozzles and other possible improvements. Some years later, the second generation expanded the initial cold start application to a mature drivability enhancement and further possibility of usage as a support for emission reduction. A leaner electronic control and heat sink concept also represented an alternative to the first generation, and an engineered plastic fuel rail replaced the first metallic concept, which was an option to the initial concerns about the combination of high temperatures and fuel.

Many software functions currently available in the engine control units have been developed for several years (decades in some cases), reengineered or adapted due to new requirements, what may add to their inherent complexity an unnecessary complication. This paper deals with the study and implementation of a software reengineering strategy for the embedded domain, which is in transfer from research department to product development, here applied to improve maintainability of flex fuel functions. The strategy uses the SCODE “Essential Analysis”, an approach for the embedded system domain. The method allows to reduce the system complexity to the unavoidable inherent problem complexity, by decomposing the system into smaller sub problems based on its essential physics. A case study was carried out to redesign a function of fuel adaptation. The analysis was performed with the support of a tool, which covers all the phases of the method.