Liquid-fed direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs) are one of the most promising candidates for portable power electronics and automotive pplications due to their potentially high-energy density, simple storage, and distribution of the fuel. The concentration of methanol in the fuel irculation loop of a DMFC system is an important operating parameter, because it determines the electrical performance...

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Treatment of NOx in diesel engine exhaust represents a big opportunity for the environmental application of low-temperature plasmas. In this paper NOx conversion to N2 was investigated by Plasma/Catalyst System Catalytic activity was enhanced by the assistance of plasma ,and the plasma/Catalyst system showed higher NOx conversion. It is shown that the plasma by itself cannot chemically reduce N...

PUMA Mind is a co-funded project aimed at enhancing the understanding of the behavior of fuel cell systems in vehicles taking advantage of the new freedoms in design that electric powertrains provide. Within this project, IDIADA focused on the integration of fuel cell systems in the automotive sector and the resulting fuel cell power demand profiles were used as base line to develop the fuel ce...

In the urban traffic mode, the engine is known to be operated mostly in a transient state. However, the wide operating range, the inherent nonlinearities of the induction process and the large modeling uncertainties make the design of the fuelinjection controller very difficult. Even though a sliding mode fuel-injection control method is in good agreement with the characteristics of the system,...

Idle speed control of ultra-lean burn engines continues to be a major focus of automotive engineers owing to the benefits offered in terms of fuel economy and emissions reduction. This paper applies a recently proposed linear time varying model predictive approach for the idle speed control of ultra-lean burn internal combustion engines. Unlike conventional gasoline engines, the approach uses f...

This race is particularly visible in the automotive field. Companies around the globe are vying to build a new, less polluting automobile engine that does not run on gasoline. In the US, for instance, General Motors (GM) spent over US$1 billion on developing an electric car that runs on a hydrogen fuel cell. It originally chose hydrogen fuel as the basis for the engine. Yet mass production of a...

The problem of controlling combustion engine emissions during the coldstart period is addressed by designing a MIMO sliding mode controller. The task of the controller is to track a given set of desired profiles of engine-out hydrocarbon emissions and catalyst temperature using spark timing and fuel injection rate as the inputs. This is an important step in solving the coldstart problem. The th...