Virtual Development of Control Coordinator for Engine and Aftertreatment Architecture Equipped with Diesel Fuel Burner

Heating devices are effective technologies to strengthen emission robustness of AfterTreatment Systems (ATS) and to guarantee emission compliance in the new boundaries given by upcoming legislations. Moreover, they allow to manage the ATS warm-up independently from engine operating conditions, thereby reducing the need for specific combustion strategies. Within heating devices, an attractive solution to provide the required thermal power without mandating a 48V platform is the fuel burner. In this work, a model-based control coordinator to manage the interaction between engine, ATS and fuel burner device has been developed, virtually validated, and optimized. The control function features a burner model and a control logic to deliver the needed amount of thermal energy, while ensuring ATS hardware protection. The coordinator has been optimized and validated through the virtual test campaign: the developed control function and a complete ATS model were integrated in the simulation environment, while different experimental engine out traces were used as input. By means of this tool, a preliminary emission performance assessment has been carried out comparing baseline ATS (Euro6d full capable) and a burner-equipped ATS; by several loops, an optimal burner strategy that minimizes tail-pipe emission was selected as well. Once the control design was deemed satisfactory, a real ATS equipped with a burner device was experimentally tested at engine dyno. The experimental campaign allowed to test the control design and assess the predictive capability of the virtual model in terms of tailpipe emission. It was found that the virtual model allowed to properly develop the control functions and to predict the emission reduction trend. From a methodology perspective, virtualization is confirmed to be a cost- and time-effective instrument to develop control logics and first-attempt calibration for their operative strategy.