The spark advance determines the efficiency of spark-ignited (SI) engines by positioning the combustion in relation to the piston motion. Today’s spark-advance controllers are open-loop systems that measure parameters that effect the sparkadvance setting and compensate for their effects. Several parameters influence the best spark-advance setting but it would be too expensive to measure and acc...

We analyze the experimental time series of internal pressure in a four cylinder spark ignition engine. In our experiment, performed for different spark advance angles, apart from the usual cyclic changes of engine pressure we observed additional oscillations. These oscillations are with longer time scales ranging from one to several hundred engine cycles depending on engine working conditions. ...

Idle speed control remains one of the most challenging problems in the automotive control eld owing to its multiple-input, multiple-output structure and the step nature of the disturbances applied. In this paper a simulation model is described for a 4.0 l production engine at idle which includes the standard bypass air valve and spark advance dynamics, as well as the e ects of operating point o...

Alternative fueled engines offer greater challenges for engine control courtesy of uncertain fuel composition. This make optimal tuning of input parameters like spark advance extremely difficult in most existing ECU architectures. This paper proposes the use of greybox extremum seeking techniques to provide real-time optimization of the spark advance in alternative fueled engines. The ability a...

In this paper we analyze the cycle-to-cycle variations of maximum pressure pmax and peak pressure angle αpmax in a four-cylinder spark ignition engine. We examine the experimental time series of pmax and αpmax for three different spark advance angles. Using standard statistical techniques such as return maps and histograms we show that depending on the spark advance angle, there are significant...

We report our results on non-periodic experimental time series of pressure in a spark ignition engine. The experiments were performed for a low rotational velocity of a crankshaft and a relatively large spark advance angle. We show that the combustion process has many chaotic features. Surprisingly, the reconstructed attractor has a characteristic butterfly shape similar to a chaotic attractor ...

Transcriptional assays, such as yeast two-hybrid and TANGO, that convert transient protein-protein interactions (PPIs) into stable expression of transgenes are powerful tools for PPI discovery, screens, and analysis of cell populations. However, such assays often have high background and lose information about PPI dynamics. We have developed SPARK (Specific Protein Association tool giving trans...