Adaptive Inverse Control System for Inter-Cylinder Output Balancing

SBIR Topic A14-077 highlights a well-known issue that, to some degree, haunts all multi-cylinder internal combustion engines: imbalance in power output between cylinders. The underlying reasons range from geometrical differences that impact the airflow entering each cylinder to manufacturing differences between fuel injectors to an array of aging effects in fuel/air delivery systems and the cylinders/pistons themselves. Cylinder power output imbalance leads to damaging vibrations that can reduce engine component life. The ideal solution to this problem is an adaptive load balancing control system that uses near-real-time feedback to adjust the fuel delivery to individual cylinders in order to maintain balanced output over a wider range of operating conditions and over the lifetime of the engine. Barron Associates, Inc. and its research partners propose to develop an adaptive-inverse based cylinder output balancing software application. The research team has decades of experience developing adaptive control systems and arguably the world?s preeminent facilities for diesel engine research and testing. The Adaptive Inverse Control System will be a small footprint software application that will be straightforward to apply to new engines since it will work alongside factory control software and it will require little up-front configuration or tuning.