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Constrained control of free piston engine generator based on implicit reference governor

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Abstract

The free piston engine generator (FPEG) is a novel power plant concept for series hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) that requires reliable control to regulate piston motion and guarantee safe operation during load transitions. This paper focuses on the control and constraint enforcement in a FPEG using a reference governor. A discrete, implicit, control oriented model describing the piston motion in a two-stroke twocylinder FPEG at the turnaround point is derived based on energy balance and a feedback controller is designed to track the desired turnaround position by regulating fuel. An implicit reference governor is developed to guarantee safe piston motion by managing the load transitions. The reference governor utilizes Newton’s method applied to an implicit nonlinear model for response prediction and a bisection search algorithm to enforce the constraints for all the future time instants by adjusting the reference command. Additionally, the error in applying one iteration of Newton’s method in predicting the response of the implicit nonlinear system is estimated and accounted for in constraint tightening to guarantee that constraints are robustly enforced. The simulation results show that the feedback control scheme incorporating the developed implicit reference governor can effectively enforce the prescribed constraints during load transition.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 61703177, 61520106008), and Jilin Provincial Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 20180101037JC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Automotive Simulation and Control, Jilin University, Changchun, 130025, China

    Xun Gong & Hong Chen

  2. Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109, USA

    Xun Gong, Ilya Kolmanovsky & Kevin Zaseck

  3. Ecole Polytechnique, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, 1050, Belgium

    Emanuele Garone

Authors
  1. Xun Gong
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  2. Ilya Kolmanovsky
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  3. Emanuele Garone
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  4. Kevin Zaseck
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  5. Hong Chen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong Chen.

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Gong, X., Kolmanovsky, I., Garone, E. et al. Constrained control of free piston engine generator based on implicit reference governor. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 61, 70203 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9337-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-017-9337-1

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