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Anyone who already had the opportunity to ride a bike has experienced the benefits of a system operating at coasting: As soon as a certain velocity is reached, the biker stops pedaling and just coasts down, administering the kinetic energy to minimize his own energy consumption. The idea, inspired by biking, that it is possible to improve fuel economy just by adopting clever coasting strategies suggests also a very promising perspective in the automotive world and, as a matter of fact, is not a really “new” thing: It has already been explored in the past on several different vehicle models. Unfortunately it has not been able to establish itself “de facto” in the market, probably due to the difficulty in conciliating the available technical solutions of the time to the extensive list of requirements imposed by automotive industry.

Brazilian energetic matrix is based on two fuels: gasoline (E22: 78% pure gasoline + 22% anhydrous ethanol) and ethanol (E100: 93% anhydrous ethanol + 7% water). A Flex Fuel 2-wheeler (motorcycle) engine management software strategy was developed in order to meet Brazilian market demand based on the energetic matrix mentioned above and a worldwide market forecast growth in the corresponding small engines segment. As 2-wheeler engine configuration and electric architecture is simpler than passenger cars, a premise was established: to develop a completely new Flex Fuel system for the 2-wheeler segment with functionalities simpler and easier to calibrate than actual concept used for Flex Fuel passenger cars. This paper presents the result of this study: a Flex Fuel system able to operate with gasoline (E22), ethanol (E100) or any mixture of both fuels with similar behavior in an easy-to-calibrate system.