Development of DAS for Diesel Engine Controls Test Lab

Abstract

Development of DAS for Diesel Engine Control Test: In today's world, it is necessary to have transportation vehicles with longer engine life, lesser fuel- consumption, and lesser soot & emission contents. Most of leading vehicle manufacturers are working in this direction. So optimization of fuel consumption and control on soot & emission pollutant from vehicles is critical aspect to be looked into while designing the engine. To accomplish this, it is necessary for the engine researcher and development organizations to have an engine test lab to characterize the engine behavior, performance and emissions. Additionally, similar test-labs are also required to study the behavior, performance of the engine, associated control schemes and algorithms. Such lab consists of test-bed using various equipments like (diesel) engine, dynamometer as a variable load, and various measuring instruments such as temperature, airflow, exhaust, speed, torque, emissions etc. Hence, in any such engine test lab, it is very important to use real-time Data Acquisition System (DAS) to capture various process variables in and around engine while performing various test-runs. This M.Tech thesis report covers our work in development of such DAS for similar Diesel Engine Control Test Lab. This report consists of mainly two parts. Part-I of the work includes the development of DAS in NI-LabView framework covering programming to interface and acquire various process variables from the Engine test bed. Part-II includes development of small application to analyze data captured from the Engine or similar test-bed. This analysis work includes extraction of some specific features/signatures from the large amount of data acquired from such test system. The test-bed for our work consist of the equipment like 200kW Diesel Engine, 250kW dynamo-meter, AC regenerative drive, PLC-SCADA based engine-dynamo test automation system. The DAS hardware comprises of National Instruments (NI) PXI chassis, multi-functional DAS, T/C & RTD cards etc. The DAS software is developed in Lab view. The pre-commissioning stage testing of the developed DAS is done using the online sensors in the laboratory. The final testing of the developed DAS integrated with the actual test-bed system will be completed after the commissioning of the main test-bed equipment. Besides, a preliminary study of Real Time Systems (RTS) is carried out on a DC motor speed control case-study example. By first carrying out simulations on the matlab-simulink platform. Then the same model-simulator is embedded onto suitable xPC target consisting of Speedgoat embedded hardware for real-time simulation. The simulation results on matlab-simulink are compared with real-time simulations on the embedded hardware and are found satisfactory.