Advanced Control/Diagnostic/Maintenance System for Diesel Engines

Impact Technologies, in collaboration with Applied Research Laboratory at Penn State University, propose to develop an Integral Engine Control and Health Management System for Marine Diesel Engines that controls engine operation, monitors engine performance, executes real-time diagnostics and performs engine fault accommodation and self-maintenance functions. Our highly qualified research team will develop an innovative control system design that integrates autonomous health management and adaptive control functions to detect incipient diesel engine faults and provide the ability to reconfigure its control to accommodate for the faults throughout all regimes of engine operation. In addition, once the faults are detected, a self-maintenance component will also be enabled that can extend current practices of periodic maintenance systems already in development in other autonomous vehicle systems. The overall program goal will be accomplished utilizing a hierarchical software architecture that is well suited for adaptive modeling and control, and can simultaneously support real-time embedded code operation. Specifically, through accurate engine regime recognition and the fusion of health management and controls logic, intelligent reasoners will provide automated response analysis to changing environmental and system degradation/failures in real-time. The technologies proposed herein will be developed and tested using data to be acquired from the Diesel Engine Test Bed at the ARL of Penn State.