Progressive reductions in vehicle emission requirements have forced the automotive industry to invest in research and development of alternative control strategies. Continual control action exerted by a dedicated electronic control unit ensures that best performance in terms of pollutant emissions and power density is married with driveability and diagnostics. Gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine technology is a way to attain these goals.
This brief describes the functioning of a GDI engine equipped with a common rail (CR) system, and the devices necessary to run test-bench experiments in detail. The text should prove instructive to researchers in engine control and students are recommended to this brief as their first approach to this technology. Later chapters of the brief relate an innovative strategy designed to assist with the engine management system; injection pressure regulation for fuel pressure stabilization in the CR fuel line is proposed and validated by experiment. The resulting control scheme is composed of a feedback integral action and a static model-based feed-forward action, the gains of which are scheduled as a function of fundamental plant parameters. The tuning of closed-loop performance is supported by an analysis of the phase-margin and the sensitivity function. Experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the control algorithm in regulating the mean-value rail pressure independently from engine working conditions (engine speed and time of injection) with limited design effort.

Autorentext
Giovanni Fiengo received his Masters degree in Computer Science Engineering from the Universitá di Napoli Federico II (Italy) in 1988 and a PhD in Information Engineering from the same university in 2001. Since November 2002, he has been with Universitá del Sannio, where he is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Engineering. His research interests are in control theory and practice, including modelling, analysis and diagnostics in the automotive field.
He has been a consultant in the automotive industry since 1999, where he jointly holds scientific publications and a patent dealing with exhaust after-treatment systems for gasoline spark-ignited engines. He is a member of the Group of Research on Automatic Control Engineering (GRACE).

Inhalt
The Common Rail System.- Mathematical Modeling of Pressure Dynamics.- GDI Injector Model.- Control Design.- Injection Time Management.