Autoignition of a homogeneous mixture is very sensitive to operating conditions, therefore fast control is necessary for reliable operation. There exists several means to control the combustion phasing of an Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) engine, but most of the presented controlled HCCI result has been performed with single-input single-output controllers. In order to fully operate an HCCI engine several output variables need to be controlled simultaneously, for example, load, combustion phasing, cylinder pressure and emissions. As these output variables have an effect on each other, the controller should be of a structure which includes the cross-couplings between the output variables. A Model Predictive Control (MPC) controller is proposed as a solution to the problem of load-torque control with simultaneous minimization of the fuel consumption and emissions, while satisfying the constraints on cylinder pressure. One of the major motivations for using MPC is that it explicitly takes the constraints into account. When operating an HCCI engine there are several contraints present, for example on the cylinder pressure and on the emissions. A drawback of MPC is the potentially large on-line computational effort, which has historically limited its application to relative slow and/or small applications. Today, MPC can be applied in relative fast systems, and we will demonstrate that it can be used for control of HCCI engine dynamics on a cycle-to-cycle basis.
As feedback signal of the combustion phasing, the crank angle for 50% burned, based on cylinder pressure, is used. In the control design of the MPC controllers (one for each cylinder), dynamic models obtained by system identification were used. This paper presents cycle-to-cycle cylinder individual control results from a six-cylinder HCCI engine using a Variable Valve Actuation (VVA) system and MPC controllers.