Nonlinear identification of a gasoline HCCI engine using neural networks coupled with principal component analysis

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) is a futuristic combustion technology that operates with high efficiency and reduced emissions. HCCI combustion is characterized by complex nonlinear dynamics which necessitates the use of a predictive model in controller design. Developing a physics based model for HCCI involves significant development times and associated costs arising from developing simulation models and calibration. In this paper, a neural networks (NN) based methodology is reported where black box type models are developed to predict HCCI combustion behavior during transient operation. The NN based approach can be considered a low cost and quick alternative to the traditional physics based modeling. A multi-input single-output model was developed each for indicated net mean effective pressure, combustion phasing, maximum in-cylinder pressure rise rate and equivalent air–fuel ratio. The two popular architectures namely multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial adial basis network rincipal component analysis basis network (RBN) models were compared with respect to design, prediction performance and overall applicability to the transient HCCI modeling problem. A principal component analysis (PCA) is done as a pre-processing step to reduce input dimension thereby reducing memory requirements of the models. Also, PCA reduces the cross-validation time required to identify optimal model hyper-parameters. On comparing the model predictions with the experimental data, it was shown that neural networks can be a powerful approach for non-linear identification of a complex combustion system like the HCCI engine.