Minimizing Fuel Use During Power Transients for Naturally Aspirated and Turbo Charged Diesel Engines

Recent development has renewed the interest in drivetrain concepts which gives a higher degree offreedom by disconnecting the engine and vehicle speeds. This freedom raises the demand for activecontrol, which especially during transients is not trivial, but of which the quality is crucial for the successof the drivetrain concept. In this work the fuel optimal engine operating point trajectories for a naturallyaspirated and a turbocharged diesel engine, connected to a load which does not restrict the engine speed,is derived, analysed and utilized for finding a suboptimal operating point trajectory. The analysis andoptimization is made with dynamic programming, Pontryagin’s maximum principle and a suboptimalstrategy based on the static optimal operating points. Methods are derived for using Pontryagin’smaximum principle for finding the optimal operating point trajectories, for simple load cases. The timeneeded for computation is reduced a factor 1000−100, depending on engine layout, compared to dynamicprogramming. These methods are only applicable to very simple load cases though. Finally, a suboptimalcalculation method which reduce the time needed for computation a factor > 1000 compared to dynamicprogramming, while showing a < 5% increase in fuel consumption compared to the optimal, is presented