Dynamic model of a two-stroke glow engine from experimental data

Resumo

The main objective of this study was to experimentally obtain the most representative linear dynamic model of a two-stroke piston engine for small unmanned aerial vehicle applications with low-cost sensors and a friendly interface based on laboratory virtual instrument engineering workbench (LabVIEW®). The engine was mounted on a test bed equipped to measure the thrust and rotational speed. The throttle lever was actuated by a standard hobby servo motor, which controlled the carburettor's valve opening. Input command and data acquisition were performed in a two-layer approach: low-cost hardware, where a micro-controller unit managed the sensor's readings, servo input, and external communications through serial protocol; and LabVIEW for command signal generation, serial port write/read, data processing, and other high-level tasks. The motor dynamics, represented by its transfer function, was obtained by minimizing the output error between the experimental responses to various types of input signal and that obtained by the simulation of a fixed-topology, fixed-order reference model that included the servo and engine models in series. © 2011 IMechE.

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