Energy Management System
for Electric Engines Using Collaborative DSP Controllers

by James W. Kirchhoff & Jacob G. Teague

Project Summary

Engine, temperature, and energy management control system designs will be applied to a small scale electric engine cooling system. Precision control of temperature and fast response to engine power dissipation changes will be achieved by methods such as state-feedback control, observer design, and neural networks.  Power dissipation data and temperature data will be exchanged via a Controller Area Network (CAN bus) interface between the engine DSP controller and the thermal DSP controller. The advanced controller methods and communication data channel will allow for better energy management of the system.

Mark Bright and Mike Donaldson designed the hardware interface for this system in their senior capstone project 2008/09. Their functional description was as follows.

An Engine Control Workstation was designed to simulate the thermal environments found in liquid-based cooling systems. The workstation allowed users to design, test, and implement controllers to more precisely regulate the thermal dissipation of a motor-generator system with the goal of reducing energy use. A user friendly GUI for temperature and engine control was designed using MATLAB and Simulink software. Workstation controller and monitoring application software was auto-code generated within the same program with the processing of the data done on a DSP board.