Integrated System ID and Control Design for an IC Engine Variable Valve Timing System

This paper applies integrated system modeling and control design process to a continuously variable valve timing (VVT) actuator system that has different control input and cam position feedback sample rates. Due to high cam shaft torque disturbance and high actuator open-loop gain, it is also difficult to maintain the cam phase at the desired constant level with an open-loop controller for system identification. As a result, multirate closed-loop system identification becomes necessary. For this study, a multirate closed-loop system identification method, pseudo-random binary signal q-Markov Cover, was used for obtaining linearized system models of the nonlinear physical system at different engine operational conditions; and output covariance constraint (OCC) controller, an H2 controller, was designed based upon the identified nominal model and evaluated on the VVT test bench. Performance of the designed OCC controller was compared with that of the well-tuned baseline proportional-integral (PI) controller on the test bench. Results show that the OCC controller uses less control effort and has significant lower overshoot than those of PI ones. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003263