Model Predictive Control and Disturbance Compensation for Engine Test Beds

Engine test beds play a big role in developing and validating all sorts of drive systems. Utilizing them for Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) tests enables parallel development of components and therefore decreases the overall design process time. The controllers for such tests need to be highly accurate in order to justify emulation of real-world operations. When combustion engines are considered, a common problem with engine test beds are the periodic oscillations that are induced by the combustion strokes. Ordinary controllers try to compensate these oscillations and thereby, introduce additional, undesired loads to the device under test (DUT). In this paper, a way to overcome this problem is presented. A model predictive control scheme uses information about future disturbances to regulate the engine speed. The unknown combustion torque is estimated by a parametric Kalman filter. Experimental results on a laboratory setup prove the practicability of the proposed methods.