Development of a Low Cost Engine Simulator for HIL Testing

The growing challenges being met by the automotive industry are raising the needs and expectations for detailed simulation with in short time. Today there is more pressure to get products to market faster and reduce design cycle times. This has led to a need for dynamic testing, where components are tested while in use with the entire system, either real or simulated, unlike in static testing where only typical functional testing is done. This dynamic testing is defined as Hardware-in-Loop (HIL) testing where it includes sensors to send signals to the control system, actuators to receive signals, a controller to process data, a Human-Machine Interface (HMI) and a development post simulation analysis platform.

The engine simulator, which is proposed in this paper, has been developed by TVS-M using a high speed embedded controller with a FPGA based I/O module. In the background a complex plant model of engine is running in a dedicated operating system platform. This simulator generates engine related signals (crankshaft signal, engine temperature signal) in response to the control signal generated by the Electronic Control Unit (ECU). This system helps the control engineers to test the new algorithms with out an actual engine and analyze the results.