Control Performance Improvement of Engine Speed Controller using Tracking Differentiator in the Crank-angle Domain

Extensive control algorithms have been investigated to improve the control performance for internal combustion (IC) engines about the engine speed control. However, seldom study has been devoted on researching how to improve the control effect without changing the structure of a certain control algorithm. In this paper, a variable sampling rate tracking differentiator (TD) is employed to compensate the phase delay in mean engine speed calculation and its update in crank-angle (CA) domain for CA based engine speed control. The proposed method is verified on a hard-in-loop (HIL) platform with a cycle-detailed marine diesel engine model. The results demonstrate that the control performance of the original controller is significantly improved, especially, the dynamic control performance under load disturbance. The proposed method has the function of plug-and-play, making it easy to apply in practical engine control unit (ECU) without changing structure and parameters in original control algorithm.