Diagnosis of On-Board Sensors in Internal Combustion (IC) Engines

This paper presents an efficient method of sensor diagnosis in electronically controlled IC engines. The approach taken by this paper is based on the failure detection and isolation (FDI) theory, and the resulting diagnostic systems can be implemented in on-board digital computers of passenger vehicles. The proposed diagnostic system, referred to as the Binary Phase Detection Filter (BPDF), employs a pair of failure sensitive filters. Based on the reference model of the given IC engine, the BPDF not only isolates an individual failed sensor, but can also closely estimate the level of failure. Hence, BPDF enables detection of a wide variety of sensor failures including soft partial types (e.g. calibration or bias drift).