Reported by Cliff Keys, Editorial Director, Power Systems Design

With automotive systems consuming more and more semiconductor devices for their control, safety and comfort specifications, the main focus has been to add more of these goodies to pull in the customers. On the other side of power engineering for the automotive sector, is the urgent development of affordable hybrid electric and battery electric vehicles.

All this is great news for the environment and for power engineering in general, but for the foreseeable future we will continue to see (and breathe) conventionally powered vehicles. Here too, engineering is hard at work for our benefit.

Simulating exhaust systems

The limits for nitrates in diesel engine emissions defined by international standards such as EURO 6 (in the European Union) and EPA 2010 TIER IV (from the USA's Environmental Protection Agency) are becoming increasingly strict. Compliance with these tougher limits is not possible without electronically controlled catalytic converters. Selective catalytic reduction (SCR) systems that use urea injection (with AdBlue) are an especially effective solution. Simulating the control algorithms plays a vital role in the development of these systems.

The ASM Diesel Exhaust Model, one of the Automotive Simulation Models (ASMs) from the leading producer of engineering tools, dSPACE, provides a complete virtual diesel exhaust aftertreatment system. In addition to the submodel for urea injection (the SCR system), it includes further submodels for a diesel oxidation catalyst (DOC) and a diesel particle filter (DPF). The simulation model can be used throughout the development process, from controller design in Simulink® to ECU testing on a dSPACE simulator. 

A special feature of the model is that users have complete access to all its Simulink blocks. They profit from being able to view the modeled functions and adapt them to specific requirements themselves. The exhaust model's individual components (DOC, DPF, SCR) can be combined in different ways and optimally configured for the aftertreatment system under test.

The model can be used to represent the essential physical and chemical processes in modern aftertreatment systems: urea decomposition for catalytic reduction, fuel post-injections for catalytic oxidation, soot particle filtering and DPF regeneration. It contains AdBlue dosing systems with and without air supply and simulates temperature, pressure and lambda sensors, providing everything necessary for efficiently developing and testing controllers for modern diesel exhaust aftertreatment systems.

Global PV market to double in 2010

The global PV market will almost double in 2010 to reach a massive 14.6GW, nearly three times size of the market back in 2008. IMS Research has analyzed PV demand in more than 40 countries globally. In addition, the forecast is based on a survey of inverter suppliers which analyzed the inverter industry’s production for 2010.

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