Abstract of Thesis presented at COPPE/UFRJ as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science (M.Sc.)

Iterative Adjustment of a Diesel Propulsion Control System

Fabiano de Souza

December/2009

Advisor:

Ramon Romankevicius Costa

Department:

Eletrical Engineering

      This work applies the iterative methods of Nelder and Mead and the Iterative Feedback Tuning to perform the tuning of controllers used to regulate the rotation velocity of Diesel engines in a way that they respond as a reference model. Instead of the actual engine, a nonlinear model of the manufacturer MTU is used and then linearized to design a PID controller. After this step, the tools of the MATLAB/SIMULINK enable simulations to compare the iterative methods with empirical and analytical methods well established in the literature in the area of control systems. This theme is of great importance in the field of propulsion systems since a flow rate of a poorly tuned Diesel engine can cause many problems such as waste of fuel, excessive wear of their parts with a decrease of its life, unavailability of the equipment, among others. The contribution of this work is the implementation of the above mentioned tuning methods to adjust the parameters of a PID controller applied to regulate the rotation velocity of a Diesel engine.