Lowering the emission, fuel economy and torque management are the essential
requirements in the recent development in the automobile industry. The main engine control
input that satisfies the above requirements is the throttling angle which adjusts the air mass
flow rate to the engine port. Due to the uncertainty and the presence of the nonlinear
components in its dynamical model, the sliding mode control theory is utilized in this work
for the throttle valve angle control system to design a robust controller for this system in the
presence of a nonlinear spring and Coulomb friction. A continuous sliding mode control law
which consists of a saturation function, instead of a signum function, and the integral of
another saturation function is used in this work. This choice for the control structure will
prevent the chattering to occurs but with a certain steady state error. On the other hand, the
addition of the integral term will effectively reduce the steady state error according to the
choice of its parameters. The simulations result for typical references of the opening throttle
angle demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller, especially after the addition of
a nonlinear integral term.
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