Nonlinear identification of a gasoline HCCI engine using neural networks coupled with principal component analysis

Homogeneous charge compression ignition (HCCI) is a futuristic combustion technology that operates with high efficiency and reduced emissions. HCCI combustion is characterized by complex nonlinear dynamics which necessitates the use of a predictive model in controller design. Developing a physics based model for HCCI involves significant development times and associated costs arising from developing simulation models and calibration. In this paper, a neural networks (NN) based methodology is reported where black box type models are developed to predict HCCI combustion behavior during transient operation. The NN based approach can be considered a low cost and quick alternative to the traditional physics based modeling. A multi-input single-output model was developed each for indicated net mean effective pressure, combustion phasing, maximum in-cylinder pressure rise rate and equivalent air–fuel ratio. The two popular architectures namely multi-layer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis network (RBN) models were compared with respect to design, prediction performance and overall applicability to the transient HCCI modeling problem. A principal component analysis (PCA) is done as a pre-processing step to reduce input dimension thereby reducing memory requirements of the models. Also, PCA reduces the cross-validation time required to identify optimal model hyper-parameters. On comparing the model predictions with the experimental data, it was shown that neural networks can be a powerful approach for non-linear identification of a complex combustion system like the HCCI engine.

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► Framework for nonlinear identification of homogeneous charge compression ignition engine using neural networks and PCA.
► Principal component analysis improves training speed and memory requirements for the neural network models.
► Linear models found to be insufficient for modeling HCCI dynamics for multiple step ahead predictions.
► Multilayer perceptron model superior to radial basis model in terms of accuracy and memory requirements.
► A multi-step ahead prediction model is developed for HCCI that has potential application in optimization and control.