Use of HIL Simulation Applied to Verification of Automotive Fuel Level Indicator During Refueling Process

The amount of fuel present in the vehicle fuel tank is an extremely important information for car users. In the majority of modern cars, the fuel level is identified through a resistance value measured by a potentiometer inside the tank. This measurement is converted to a digital information that will be filtered by computational algorithms embedded on the responsible Electronic Control Unit (ECU) and shown to the user by Instrument Panel Cluster (IPC) Gauge. The reliability of this information is a critical factor due to fuel economy and safety issues. Some agents can affect the fuel level measurement during the refueling process, such as the fuel slosh (fluid disturbance on the tank), that could compromise the reliability of the information provided to the user. Perform this feature test could be very expensive, demanding car prototypes, several engineer work hours and fuel manipulation. This paper proposes the use of Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) simulation to perform automated verification for fuel level indication during refueling process. As result, identify opportunities to improve ECU algorithm increasing software reliability.