Implementation of Optimized Artificial Neural Networks for Real-Time Estimation of Low Pressure Cooled Exhaust Gas Recirculation in a Turbocharged Gasoline Direct Injection Engine Using a Model-Based Design Approach

Low pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation (LP-EGR) system has been widely adopted to improve energy efficiency in turbocharged gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines. In order to utilize complete beneficial effects of the LP-EGR, a technique capable of accurately observing the LP-EGR flow into the cylinder in real-time is a prerequisite. To precisely estimate the LP-EGR rate in real-time, this paper proposes artificial neural network (ANN) models and its implementation on a real-time embedded system. As inputs for the ANN models, 12 combustion parameters physically correlated with the LP-EGR in the combustion process are selected and calculated from the in-cylinder pressure. The ANN models for the real-time LP-EGR estimation were trained with the steady-state data of 30,000 cycles and their hyper-parameters were searched by a hyper-parameter optimization method. Moreover, a model-based design procedure is introduced to implement the optimized ANN models on the real-time embedded system. Since the proposed implementation performs the validation procedure for each process, it provides a systematic and seamless process for creating ANN models for real-time embedded systems. In real-time experiments under eight steady-state engine operating points, the embedded ANN models show the estimation performance with R² of above 0.9716. The operation time of each ANN was less than 1.285 ms meaning that the target system can operate in real-time sufficiently with a mass-produced 32 bit microprocessor up to 256 MHz.