Diesel Particulate Filter Thermal Management Using Model-Based Design 2009-01-1082

Diesel Particulate Filters (DPF) are now considered as efficient solutions to reduce Diesel PM emissions. Concerned by environment, Renault will equip all serial production Diesel vehicles with this technology.

The main issue for these devices is the periodical regeneration necessary to eliminate the accumulated soot. The challenging enhancement of the regeneration event can be achieved with a better regeneration temperature control. For this purpose, a controller based on a physical model is proposed to manage the DPF temperature during active regeneration.

This paper describes the methodology which has been followed to design this controller. In a first step, a reduced physical model has been developed and validated with experimental data. In a second step, two model-based controllers have been studied: a robust LPV (Linear Parameter Varying) and a gain scheduling PID..Special attention has been paid to the simplification as far as possible of the controller tuning process. Thus, the calibration parameters are only dependent upon some physical parameters and performance requirements of the closed-loop control: bandwidth, maximum overshoot. Performance robustness has been assessed in simulation. The whole modeling, controller design and validation, as well as robustness analysis have been performed using Matlab/Simulink®. Finally, the strategy has been validated on a vehicle using rapid prototyping tools.