Optimizing modern automotive systems through model-based control: a physics-based approach

The initiative to curtail greenhouse gas emissions that President Barack Obama has made a centerpiece of his second term and that our president-elect will hopefully make it as a priority in his yet-to announced energy policy, has been spurred great interest among automotive companies to expand their portfolio with new vehicle technologies, such as hybrid and electric vehicles, as well as adopting new engines technologies  and mission reduction devices, like gasoline direct injection, catalytic converters and particulate filters.

Optimal and robust utilization and increased safety of such modern automotive systems can be obtained through advanced model-based control and optimization strategies. Recent trends in automotive control research have pointed out the inherent necessity to ‘bring in more physics’ into such control design phase.  The use of physics-based models to predict system and component behavior can substantially increase performance of such complex engineering systems and create the platform to develop robust control strategies.

In this seminar, we will focus on Emission Mitigation and Sustainable Transport Systems, and discuss recent modeling and estimation developments achieved by our group on Three Way Catalysts and Lithium-ion battery systems. We will show how the adoption of physics-based models (in the form of partial-differential equations) can enhance the development and utilization of such systems for online on-board diagnosis and robust health-monitoring, within an embedded control framework. Throughout the seminar, open issues and challenges that still need to be addressed to further develop the field will be also discussed.

Speaker: Simona Onori, Clemson University