We present an industrial case study in automotive control of significant complexity: the new common rail fuel injection system for Diesel engines, currently under production by Magneti Marelli Powertrain. In this system, a flow–rate valve, introduced before the High Pressure (HP) pump, regulates the fuel flow that supplies the common rail according to the engine operating point. The standard ap...

Low fuel consumption is one of the greatest merits of the Diesel engine, emission of nitrous oxides, NOx, and particulate matter, PM, are its most prominent disadvantages. For modern passenger car diesel engines, to achieve low fuel consumption targets, i.e. CO2 emissions, and to simultaneously fulfil the ambitious EU6 emissions legislation, a combination of intelligent injection strategies and...

While large scale diffusion of alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) is widely anticipated, the mechanisms that determine their success or failure are ill understood. Analysis of an AFV transition model developed at MIT has revealed that AFV diffusion dynamics are particularly sensitive to consumer consideration as influenced by social exposure to AFVs. While some empirical research in this area exi...

Problem statement: We have recently introduced several important improvements in the measurement of distillation curves for complex fluids. The modifications include a compositionexplicit data channel for each distillate fraction and temperature measurements that are true thermodynamic state points that can be modeled with an equation of state. The composition-explicit information is achieved w...

This project examined the influence of preexisting, experimentally induced pulmonary emphysema on the adverse health effects in rats of chronic inhalation exposure to either nitrogen dioxide or automotive diesel-engine exhaust. Previous reports indicated that humans with chronic lung disease were among those most severely affected by episodic exposures to high concentrations of airborne toxican...