Control of diesel engine dual-loop EGR air-path systems by a singular perturbation method

This paper presents a singular perturbation based method for controlling the dual-loop exhaust gas recirculation (DL-EGR) air-path systems on advanced diesel engines. A DL-EGR air-path system, consisting of a high-pressure loop EGR (HPL-EGR) and a low-pressure loop EGR (LPL-EGR), has significantly different time-scales (fast and slow) due to the inherent difference in the HPL-EGR’s and LPL-EGR’s corresponding control volumes. Such a feature of the DL-EGR systems makes the cooperative control of intake manifold gas conditions challenging. By considering the DL-EGR air-path system as a singularly perturbed system, a composite control law was devised to achieve systematic control of the air-path conditions including gas pressure, temperature, and oxygen fraction in the intake manifold. The effectiveness of the control method is experimentally evaluated on a medium-duty diesel engine.