Using Multiple Cylinder Ion Measurements for Improved Estimation of Combustion Variability

Estimation of combustion variability can be performed by using ion currents measured at the spark plug. A scheme is here proposed that exploits the potential of using measurements from multiple cylinders to improve the estimation accuracy of combustion variability (measured by the coefficient of variation of IMEP). This is realised by dividing combustion variability into categories and having one classifier running for each cylinder with the ion current as input signal. The final estimate of combustion variability is then formed by a majority vote among the classifiers. This scheme is shown to improve estimation accuracy by up to 15% on measurements taken from highway driving in a production vehicle.