In-cylinder pressure-based convolutional neural network for real-time estimation of low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation in turbocharged gasoline direct injection engines

Low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation is one of the most promising technologies for improving fuel efficiency of turbocharged gasoline direct injection engines. To realize the beneficial effects of the low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation, the accurate estimation of the low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation rate is essential for precise low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation control. In this respect, previous studies have suggested in-cylinder pressure-based low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation models to obtain the low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation rate into the cylinders with fast response. However, these methods require considerable manual process of feature engineering to extract and analyze the combustion characteristics from the cylinder pressure traces. Furthermore, the performance of the entire model is limited solely to certain hand-crafted characteristics and their mathematical formulations. To resolve these limitations, we propose an in-cylinder pressure-based convolutional neural network for low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation estimation. Because the convolutional neural network model automatically learns the complex function between the raw input of the high-dimensional cylinder pressure traces and the low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation rate through an end-to-end deep learning framework, this convolutional neural network model provides a more effective and precise modeling process compared to the conventional combustion characteristics-based regression models. The proposed convolutional neural network model consists of the input layer with the previous consecutive cycles of the pressure traces to resolve the model uncertainty from cycle-to-cycle variations. This input layer is connected to one convolutional layer, two fully connected layers, and the final output layer that is the target low-pressure cooled exhaust gas recirculation rate. The proposed model was trained, validated, and tested using a total of 50,000 cycles of engine experimental data under various transient driving conditions. The remarkable accuracy of the proposed model was evaluated with R2 values over 0.99 and root mean square error values of less than 1.5% under the transient conditions. Moreover, the real-time performance and low memory requirement were also verified on the target embedded platform.