Simulation and control of an electro-hydraulic actuated clutch

The basic function of any type of automotive transmission is to transfer the engine torque to the vehicle with the desired ratio smoothly and efficiently and the most common control devices inside the transmission are clutches and hydraulic pistons. The automatic control of the clutch engagement plays a crucial role in Automatic Manual Transmission (AMT) vehicles, being seen as an increasingly important enabling technology for the automotive industry. It has a major role in automatic gear shifting and traction control for improved safety, drivability and comfort and, at the same time, for fuel economy. In this paper, a model for a wet clutch actuated by an electro-hydraulic valve used by Volkswagen for automatic transmissions is presented. Starting from the developed model, a simulator was implemented in Matlab/Simulink and the model was validated against data obtained from a test-bench provided by Continental Automotive Romania, which includes the Volkswagen wet clutch actuated by the electro-hydraulic valve. Then, a predictive control strategy is applied to the model of the electro-hydraulic actuated clutch with the aims of controlling the clutch piston displacement and decreasing the influence of the network-induced delays on the control performances. The simulation results obtained with the proposed method are compared with the ones obtained with different networked controllers and it is shown that the strategy proposed in this paper can indeed improve the performances of the control system.