Design of Active Fault-Tolerant Control System for Air-Fuel Ratio control of Internal Combustion engine using nonlinear regression-based observer model

Abstract

Internal Combustion (IC) engines are prevalent in the process sector, and maintaining sufficient Air-Fuel Ratio (AFR) regulation in their fuel system is crucial for enhanced engine performance, fuel economy, and environmental safety. Faults in the AFR system’s sensors cause the engine to shut down, hence, fault tolerance is essential. In order to avoid engine shutdown, this paper offers a novel Active Fault-Tolerant Control System (AFTCS) for air-fuel ratio control of an Internal Combustion (IC) engine in a process plant. In the Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) unit, the proposed AFTCS uses a nonlinear regression-based observer model for analytical redundancy. The suggested system was simulated in the MATLAB / Simulink environment. The proposed system was tested at two different speeds (300 r/min and 600 r/min) and the results show that the system’s response is within the acceptable bound without compromising the stability. The findings also demonstrate the higher fault tolerance capability for sensor defects of the AFR control system, particularly for the MAP sensor (at 300 r/min) in terms of reduced oscillatory response in comparison to the current literature. Compared to the linear regression-based and Genetic Algorithm (GA) based model, the nonlinear regression-based model results in a more accurate estimation of the faulty sensors. The proposed model is also efficient in terms of computation power and response time.