Organic Rankine Cycle for Vehicles: Control Design and Experimental Results

Johan Peralez (1, 2) , Madiha Nadri (1) , Pascal Dufour (1) , Paolino Tona (2) , Antonio Sciarretta (2)

1 LAGEP - Laboratoire d'automatique et de génie des procédés
2 IFPEN - IFP Energies nouvelles

The system considered here is an organic Rankine cycle for recovering waste heat from a heavy-duty diesel engine. Because of the highly transient conditions these systems are subject to, control plays a fundamental role to enable the viability and efficiency of those systems. In this context, this paper investigates the problem of control design for superheating (SH) and pressure at evaporator outlet. Based on a moving boundary heat exchanger model, a first controller, which consists of a dynamic feedforward combined to a gain-scheduled PID, is implemented on the pump speed to maintain the SH close to the set-point value. Experimental results illustrate the enhanced performance in terms of disturbance rejection. Then, a second controller based on nonlinear state estimation is proposed. This is a nonlinear feedback law, which allows to adjust the evaporating pressure to time-varying demand with a good accuracy.

Mots clés: control design; feedforward; heavy-duty vehicles; observer; Rankine cycle; waste heat recovery (WHR)

Domaines: Automatique

Johan Peralez, Madiha Nadri, Pascal Dufour, Paolino Tona, Antonio Sciarretta. Organic Rankine Cycle for Vehicles: Control Design and Experimental Results. IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 2017, 25 (3), pp.952 - 965. ⟨10.1109/TCST.2016.2574760⟩. ⟨hal-01443948⟩