Waste Heat Recovery System

Another cool project that I am working is related to Waste Heat Recovery (WHR) systems. We intend to use the WHR system for automotive applications to recover the engine exhaust gas heat and convert it to useful electrical energy. At the moment, as many of you know, the exhaust heat energy is not used in any sense, even though it represents 30 to 40% from the fuel energy. If we are able to recover part of this lost energy, future combustion engines can be much more efficient than now. However, the big challenge to make this a success is to make it work in highly dynamic conditions while maximizing its efficiency. And these are the main aspects I am focusing in this project.

Below, you can see a cool video filmed partly with the heat camera. Enjoy the video and don’t forget to subscribe for more updates on the project. See you next time!

 

How to make your car smarter

Driving a manual transmission smoothly is a task that takes a lot of training for some people, since it requires knowledge and finesse. This task becomes even more challenging in a truck or other large vehicle. These vehicles are more difficult to drive smoothly because of a larger engine, more rigid transmission, and heavy flywheel. To solve these issues the Smart Acceleration Pedal (SAP) system is proposed.

Online Optimizer in Matlab Simulink

Fig. 1: The Grid Search method applied to the White Mountain function: • – evaluation grid, • – centroid, * – optimum.

When it comes down to optimization, Matlab is a great tool. A good review of what is possible with Matlab in terms of optimization can be found here. However, when trying to use optimization routines that can run online in Simulink, at the moment the tools are scarce, especially when dealing with non-linear systems modeled in Simulink. In this post, I will share with you an implementation of the Grid Search optimization routine in Matlab/Simulink.