Engine, temperature, and energy management control system designs will be applied to a small scale electric engine cooling system. Mark Bright and Mike Donaldson designed the hardware interface for this system in their senior capstone project 2008/09. Their functional description was as follows.
An Engine Control Workstation was designed to simulate the thermal environments found in liquid-based cooling systems. The workstation allowed users to design, test, and implement controllers to more precisely regulate the thermal dissipation of a motor-generator system with the goal of reducing energy use. A user friendly GUI for temperature and engine control was designed using MATLAB and Simulink software. Workstation controller and monitoring application software was auto-code generated within the same program with the processing of the data done on a DSP board.
The 2008/09 senior project revealed several areas that need improvement. Precision control of temperature and fast response to engine power dissipation changes were limited due to the performance capabilities of a single loop controller for the coolant temperature. This will be addressed in the new project by using a CAN bus interface to supply power dissipation information from the engine DSP controller to the thermal DSP controller. The thermal DSP controller will supply temperature data to the engine DSP controller that will be used to limit power dissipation (engine speed governor). Controllers for both the engine and cooling system can be advanced (multi-loop and disturbance rejection architectures) with this new communication channel. This should allow for better precision and fast response for the engine and thermal controllers. The new communication data will also allow a better energy management method to be developed.