Boost pressure control for a large diesel engine with turbocharger

Similar to their small and mid-sized counterparts, today´s large engines commonly employ turbochargers, mainly due to performance and fuel efficiency benefits. The turbocharger pressurizes the intake manifold which results in additional engine power. This pressure, however, needs to be precisely controlled in order to have reliable engine operations and avoid any relevant engine damages. We represent the air path dynamics of a locomotive diesel engine in state-space form and estimate the unknown system parameters online under changing operating conditions. We update the controller gains based on the parameter estimates and validate the performance of this adaptive control design using BOOST Real-Time (RT), an advanced simulation tool developed by AVL in order to accurately predict the behavior and the effectiveness of internal combustion engines.