2005-24-058

SAE TECHNICAL
PAPER SERIES
Air/Fuel Control System in SI Engines Based on Virtual
Lambda Sensor

N. Cesario, M. Di Meglio, F. Pirozzi, G. Moselli, F. Taglialatela, F. Carpentieri

APG – Powertrain & Safety Division-Advanced Applications R&D STMicroelectronics, Arzano (Na), Italy

Capri, Naples
Italy
September 11-16, 2005
 2005-24-058

Air/Fuel Control System in SI Engines based on

Virtual Lambda Sensor
N. Cesario, M. Di Meglio, F. Pirozzi, G. Moselli, F. Taglialatela and F. Carpentieri
APG – Powertrain & Safety Division - Advanced Applications R&D
STMicroelectronics, via Remo De Feo 1, Arzano 80022 Italy
nicola.cesario@st.com, maurizio.di-meglio@st.com, francesco.pirozzi@st.com,
gianni.moselli@st.com, ferdinando.taglialatela@st.com, francesco.carpentieri@st.com
tel. 0812381152, fax. 0812381114

ABSTRACT • a simple block evaluating both the error and the

error variation, obtained comparing the air-fuel
In this work, we suggest a scheme of Air/Fuel control ratio value estimated by the virtual lambda
system for SI engines in which there is not need of a sensor with the reference air-fuel ratio;
lambda sensor (O2 sensor). This system is based on a • a controller, developed with soft computing
virtual lambda sensor, that is, an emulator of the real techniques, that modifies the injection strategy
lambda sensor. The virtual lambda sensor is a model decided by the feedforward part in function of
able to forecast the Air/Fuel values of an SI engine in the error associated to the air-fuel ratio estimate
function of features derived by a suitable processing of performed by the virtual lambda sensor.
the cylinder pressure signal. A
speed
DIFF
engine
mappe maps
di controllo
INTRODUCTION load
del motore
A1

In order to meet the stricter and stricter automotive

emission regulations, in SI engines it is important to Er B DI = DI FE + DIFF

maintain a strict control of the Air/Fuel. In particular, the ref

errordell’errore
valutazione and
soft computing
controllore
B2 DIFE
error variation
e della variazione engine
motore
target is to have an air-fuel mixture close to the evaluator
dell’errore B1
controller
soft computing
B 2

stoichiometric condition. In so doing, the three way Der

catalyst, placed into the exhaust system, has its C

maximum efficiency in converting the toxic exhaust sensore
virtual lambda
lambda features selector
identificatore di sensore
pressuredi
gases (CO, NOx, HC) of the combustion into less virtuale
sensor
C1
features
C2
pressione
sensor
harmful products (CO2, H2O, N2). Generally, to keep the
Air/Fuel close to the stoichiometric condition (λ≈1), it is
used an O2 sensor (lambda sensor) placed into the Fig. 1. Block scheme of the Air/Fuel control system
proposed in this work.
exhaust system. The aim of this sensor is to detect if in
the air-fuel mixture, used to feed the engine, there is a
lack (λ<1) or a surplus (λ>1) of oxygen. Then, the ECU,
using the signal of the lambda sensor as feedback, With this Air/Fuel control system, we are able to obtain
modifies the injection strategy (ignition timing, injection the following technical effect: to maintain effectively the
timing and injection time). air-fuel mixture of an SI engine in a strict range around
In this work, we propose an Air/Fuel closed-loop control the stoichiometric condition without the using of a real
system. It is composed by a feedforward and a feedback lambda sensor. For sake of simplicity, throughout this
part. The feedforward part is represented by the engine paper we refer to the virtual lambda sensor with the
control maps while the feedback part, which is the acronym VLS.
principal innovation of the system, is composed by five
blocks (see fig.1).
• a low cost cylinder pressure sensor in the SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
internal combustion chamber of the engine;
• a features recognition block, that is, a In this section we will make a brief description of all the
subsystem able to select some characteristic components of the Air/Fuel control system that we
features of the cylinder pressure signal that propose.
could be used to estimate effectively the air-fuel
ratio of the engine; FEEDFORWARD CONTROL: ENGINE MAPS (A1
• a virtual lambda sensor, that is, an emulator of SUBSYSTEM)
the way of working of the real lambda sensor;
 The phase devoted to the setting-up of the engine maps
(calibration of the engine maps), has been performed in
the traditional way at our test bench room. For each
input couple (speed, load), we have seek the optimal
injection (injection timing and injection time both coded
in the control variable DIFF) and ignition strategy (Spark
Advance). The optimal ignition strategy corresponds to
the MBT condition while the optimal injection strategy is
the one that maintains the engine close the
stoichiometric condition. The searching of the optimal
value of DIFF takes place on a grid of values of the input
variables. When the input couple (speedi, loadi) is not
equal to one of the engine conditions analysed during
the calibration phase, the injection strategy used to
drive the engine is obtained by a linear interpolation of
the DIFF values associated to the vertices of the
rectangular region of the plane (speed, load) in which
the current input couple falls. This feedforward control
system has two drawbacks:
• the linear interpolation of DIFF values might not
be the best way to fit the functioning of a non
linear system as the gasoline engine;
• the calibration of the engine maps has been
made for fixed conditions of pressure and
temperature and without taking into account the
engine aging.
These drawbacks are balanced by the feedback action
based on the processing of the lambda sensor output.
FEEDBACK CONTROL
The idea behind this Air/Fuel control system is to try to
control the injection of SI engines without the using of
lambda sensors but just processing the signal delivered
by a low cost in-cylinder pressure sensor.
Features selector (C2 subsystem)
The aim of this subsystem is to make a pre-processing
of the data coming from the cylinder pressure sensor
signal in order to select the features more correlated
with the lambda values. In other words, this block
selects the best inputs of the VLS, that is, the best inputs
of the learning machine designed to emulate the
functioning of the lambda sensor.
(feature (camp ),....feature (camp ),...feature (camp ))
1 1 j 1 N 1
.........................................................................................
(feature1 (campi ),....featurej (campi ),...featureN (campi ))
.........................................................................................
(feature (camp
1 M ),....featurej (campM ),...featureN (campM ))
(feature opt 1
Fig. 2. Data flow of the features selector block.
Moreover, it is able to find the optimal sampling of the
inputs, that is, the number of cycle-by-cycle values on
which we have to average to optimize the prediction of
the lambda values. From an algorithmic point of view,
the action of this block is based on some clustering
analysis techniques suitably handled. The figure 2
shows the data flow of this block. For a more detailed
description of the technical aspects related to the
working of this block, one can refer to [3, 4].
Virtual Lambda Sensor (C1 subsystem)
In practice, the VLS is a learning machine trained to be
able to predict the lambda value and its “class”, i.e. 0 for
lambda values corresponding to rich air-fuel mixtures
(λ <1) and 1 for lambda values corresponding to lean
mixtures (λ >1). These predictions are performed in
function of suitable features selected by the previous
block. In literature, there are several kinds of learning
machine, such as neural networks, support vector
machines, committee machines, stochastic machines,
self-organizing maps, etc…. Each of them is different
from the others for the different structure and/or
topology, for the different learning algorithm, for the
different strategy of the setting-up of the endogenous
parameters, for the different strategy of cross-validation,
etc…. In this section, we want to describe one of the
learning machine structures which seem to be one of the
most promising ways to develop a VLS (for other
implementation of the VLS one can refer to [1, 2]).
output1
input1 linear lambda
Pratio40
MLP
MLP
Edge
Edge
input2
Detector Pre-Proc. neural
neural Post-Proc. Class.
Class. output2
Pratio50
Detector Pre-Proc.
network
network
Post-Proc.
on-
on-off lambda
input3
Pmax
Fig. 3. Block scheme of a virtual lambda sensor developed
by neural networks.
The figure 3 illustrates the block scheme of the VLS
developed by neural networks. The inputs of the model
are Pratio40, Pratio50 e Pmax. The choice of these
inputs has been made by the features selector
subsystem. As we can see in figure, the first block
placed on data flow is the edge detector. The aim of this
block is to make the synchronization the model
components with the incoming data. It samples the data
and provides an enable signal to the following blocks.
The action of the edge detector block is based on the
processing of the Pmax signal because we have
observed that the Pmax signal is less prone to sudden
variations. The Pre-Proc. block makes a pre-processing
of the incoming data in order to reduce the input cycle-
clustering
λ by-cycle variation. It carries out a moving average of the
analysis input data. The number of cycles on which the average
has to be made can be modified by the user. In this
case, the optimal value of this parameter has been
chosen by the features selector. Since, this parameter
( camp opt ), feature opt 2 ( camp opt ), feature opt 3 ( camp opt ) ) could affect the response time of the VLS, it is better that
the number of cycles on which the average has to be
made is as more small as possible. The Post-Proc. block
works likewise to the Pre-Proc. block. In figure 4, we can
observe the improvement of the VLS performance with
the application of the Pre-Proc. and Post-Proc. blocks.
The performance of a VLS, built without and with the
Pre-Proc. and Post-Proc. Blocks, (see yellow line) has
been compared on a data set describing the working of
our test bench engine from a rich air-fuel mixture
condition to a lean mixture condition (see violet line).
λ
# engine event
λ ∆T
# engine event
Fig. 4. Comparison of the VLS performance without
and with the using of the Pre-Proc. and Post-Proc.
blocks.
In the figure 3, the main important block is the MLP
(Multi Layer Perceptron) neural network, that we have
used for this implementation of the VLS. This block
contains several sub-blocks useful to deal suitably the
input and output signals of the neural network. All the
endogenous parameters of the neural network, such as
the regularitazion parameter, the number of hidden
layers, the number of neurons for each hidden layer, the
type of activation function for the neurons, etc…, has
been set in order to maximize the “generalized forecast
capability” of the learning machine (for a more detailed
description of this concept one can refer to [5, 7]).
“Generalized” means that the choice of the endogenous
parameters of the model is made to increase the model
generalization capability, that is, the capability of
predicting non measured air-fuel mixture values. In this
context, we have approached this problem turning it into
in a minimum searching problem. As fitness function we
have chosen an our handling of the ordinary cross-
validation estimate (see [6]) of the endogenous
parameters of a learning machine.
∑ ∑[
N* N ∆_DI
1 1
V0 ( S1 , S 2 ,..., S P ) = λ k − F(iS1 ,S 2 ,...,S P ) ( x ki )
N* i =1 N k =1 i
i
N +M 
N * =  
 N 
In the above equations, N* is the number of possible
choices of a testing set of N elements and a training set
of M elements on a data set composed by (N+M) input-
output couples. The index ki labels the N elements of a
testing data set selected by the i-th choice. The output of
the neural network model trained on the M input-output
couples related to the i-th choice is represented by the
symbol F(iS1 ,S 2 ,...,S P ) . The optimal string of the
endogenous parameters (S1,S2,…,SP) of the model is
the one that minimizes the functional V0(S1,S2,…,SP).
The searching of the minimum of this functional has
been performed by using a stochastic searching
algorithm: the PSOA (Particle Swarm Optimization
Algorithm), see [8].
Error and Error Variation Evaluator (B1 subsystem)
B1
λ_r Error(T)
N1
C_ error(T)
λ_v
N2
Fig. 5. Subsystem B1: it estimates the error and the
error variation between the VLS signal λ_v and the
reference signal of lambda λ_r.
To control effectively the air/fuel of the test case engine,
it is needful to evaluate the error and the error variation
between the VLS signal (λ_v) and the reference signal of
lambda (λ_r). For this purpose, the input signal are
suitably dealt by sum blocks and a time delay, see figure
5. The subsystem B1 evaluates the outputs at the time T
according to the following equations:
Error(T) = N1*(λ_r - λ_v)
C_error(T) = N2*(Error(T) - Error(T-∆T))
where N1 and N2 are two normalization factors.
Soft Computing Controller (B2 subsystem)
This subsystem estimates the update of the control
variable ∆_DI in function of the error (Error) and the
error variation (C_error). In the control system
architecture, the aim of this subsystem is to bring to zero
its two inputs. In so doing, λ_v is equal to λ_r (λ =1).
Error
B2
]
Controller
C_error
Fig. 6. Subsystem B2: it estimates the updating of the
control variable.
In this work, we have implemented the subsystem B2 by
fuzzy techniques. We have considered the following
fuzzy sets of the input variable Error (En):
• E_P “positive error”
• E_N “negative error”
• E_Z “zero error”
with the corresponding membership functions.
Fig. 7. Fuzzy sets of the input variable En with the
corresponding membership functions.
About the input variable C_error (Cen), we have
considered the following fuzzy sets:
• CE_P “variation of the positive error”
• CE_N “variation of the negative error”
• CE_Z “variation of the zero error”
with the corresponding membership functions.
Fig. 8. Fuzzy sets of the input variable Cen with
the corresponding membership functions.
Our implementation of the subsystem B2 is a fuzzy
system having as antecedents the fuzzy sets of En
(error) and Cen (error variation) and as consequents the
fuzzy sets of the output variable ∆_DI (injection time):
• I_N “positive injection”
• I_P “negative injection”
• I_Z “zero injection”
Fig. 9. Fuzzy sets of the output variable ∆_DI
with the corresponding membership functions.
The fuzzy algorithm conceived for designing of the
controller is composed by 9 rules having the following
traditional form:
• IF E_P AND CE_P THEN output IS I_P
• IF E_N AND CE_N THEN output IS I_N
• IF E_P AND CE_Z THEN output IS I_P
• IF E_N AND CE_Z THEN output IS I_N
• IF E_P AND CE_N THEN output IS I_Z
• IF E_N AND CE_P THEN output IS I_Z
• IF E_Z AND CE_Z THEN output IS I_Z
• IF E_Z AND CE_N THEN output IS I_N
• IF E_Z AND CE_P THEN output IS I_P
The function of the fuzzy algorithm described by the
previous rules is to provide for each couple of values of
the input variables En and Cen a value of the control
variable ∆_DI (injection time). The figure 10 illustrates
the tridimensional map summarizing the way of
functioning of the controller.
Finally, to estimate the update of the control variable
induced by the feedback part of the Air/Fuel control
system (DIFE), the output of the subsystem B2 is
processed in the following way:
DIFE = N3* ∆_DI(T)+ ∆_DI(T-∆T)
where N3 and ∆T are two factors to be tuned.
Fig. 10. Tridimensional map describing how the fuzzy
controller works.
TESTING OF THE AIR/FUEL CONTROL SYSTEM
TEST BENCH EQUIPMENT
The Air/Fuel control system proposed in this work has
been designed, validated and tested on the experimental
data of the Yamaha YP125 gasoline engine. This is a
four stroke spark ignition engine with a displacement
equal to 125cc used to feed trade scooters. In order to
have a data set as more uniform as possible, we have
acquired experimental data at different engine speeds,
throttle positions and spark advances. The figure 11
describes the experimental equipment that we have
used to acquire data for training, validation and testing of
all the components of the Air/Fuel control system.

Fig. 11. Experimental equipment used to acquire data
for training, validation and testing of the Air/Fuel
control system proposed in this work.
REAL-TIME TESTING: RESULTS
We have made real-time tests of the Air/Fuel control
system on the test bench engine: Yamaha YP125. In the
steady states, the control system based only on the
signal of the virtual lambda sensor is able to maintain
strictly the engine close the stoichiometric condition with
an error within 1%. The figures 12 and 13 show the
results related these real-time tests. The first describes
the working of the control system in the steady state:
4600 rpm and WOT (Wide Open Throttle) condition. The
second describes the working in the steady state: 5400
rpm and torque = 1.5Nm. Moreover, the Air/Fuel control
system has displayed a satisfactory functioning in
transient conditions too. In figure 14, we can observe
how in a transient condition the system is able to bring
quickly the engine close the stoichiometric (λ=1).
Fig. 12. Real-time test of the Air/Fuel control system
in the steady state: 4600 rpm and WOT (Wide Open
Throttle) condition.
Fig. 13. Real-time test of the Air/Fuel control system
in the steady state: 5400 rpm and torque = 1.5Nm.
Fig. 14. Real-time test of the Air/Fuel control system
in a transient condition manually induced, 4600 rpm.
The starting point of the transient condition has been set
disabling the Air/Fuel control and, for a fixed throttle
position, varying the injection time. In this case, we have
increased the injection time in order to induce a rich air-
fuel mixture condition. Then, the Air/Fuel control system
has been enabled and in less than 150 engine cycles it
was able to bring the engine close the reference value
(λ=1).
CONCLUSION
The idea behind this Air/Fuel control system for SI
engines is to explore the possibility of replacing the
lambda sensor by the virtual lambda sensor, that is, a
model able to emulate effectively the way of functioning
of the lambda sensor. Since the inputs of this model are
features suitably selected by the cylinder pressure
signal, our system solution for SI engine is to replace a
real sensor (the O2 sensor) by another real sensor (the
in-cylinder pressure sensor). Really, this solution could
appear as more expensive than the traditional solution
based on the using of the lambda sensor. Anyway, the
gain in terms of cost of the our system solution is related
to the possibility of implementing a piezoresistive
pressure transducer having a sensitivity comparable with
the sensitivity of the traditional piezoelectric pressure
transducers used in test bench equipments. However,
our solution seems to be promising if we analyze the
added value that in terms of OBD (On Board
Diagnostic), prognostics, fault diagnostic, etc…, the
processing of the cylinder pressure signal could bring to
the injection control systems of SI engines. For example,
a suitable processing of the cylinder pressure signal
could be helpful in order to control and/or remove
undesirable phenomena such as misfire, knocking, etc…
(e.g. see [9, 10, 11, 12] ).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank all the people involved in this research activity:
Sig. P. Cassese, Ing. C. Muscio, Ing. G. Ciaccia, dott. O.
Scognamiglio.
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