Model based control for waste heat recovery rankine cycle system in heavy duty trucks

Driven by future emissions legislations and increase in fuel prices engine, gas heat recovering has recently attracted a lot of interest. In the past few years, a high number of studies have shown the interest of energy recovery Rankine based systems for heavy duty trucks engine compounding. Recent studies have brought a significant potential for such a system in a Heavy Duty (HD) vehicle, which can lead to a decrease in fuel consumption of about 5% [Wang et al. (2011)] and reduce engine emissions. But many challenges still need to be faced before the vehicle integration. This paper presents a control strategy development for waste heat recovery Rankine based systems in heavy duty trucks. Due to the highly transient operating conditions, improving the control strategy of those systems is an important step to their integration into a vehicle. It is shown here that moving to more advanced control strategies than classical PIDs lead to some gains in terms of performance. Due to the limited availability and high operational cost of test bench, the validation of such a controller is done on a representative and previously validated model.