A Virtual Combustion Sensor Based on Ion Current for Lean-Burn Natural Gas Engine

In this study, an innovative sensor was designed to detect the key combustion parameters of the marine natural gas engine. Based on the ion current, any engine structurally modified was avoided and the real-time monitoring for the combustion process was realized. For the general applicability of the proposed sensor, the ion current generated by a high-energy ignition system was acquired in a wide operating range of the engine. It was found that engine load, excess air coefficient (lambda) and ignition timing all generated great influence on both the chemical and thermal phases, which indicated that the ion current was highly correlated with the combustion process in the cylinder. Furthermore, the correlations between the 5 ion current-related parameters and the 10 combustion-related parameters were analyzed in detail. The results showed that most correlation coefficients were relatively high. Based on the aforementioned high correlation, the novel sensor used an on-line algorithm at the basis of neural network models. The models took the characteristic values extracted from the ion current as the inputs and the key combustion parameters as the outputs to realize the online combustion sensing. Four neural network models were established according to the existence of the thermal phase peak of the ion current and two different network structures (BP and RBF). Finally, the predicted values of the four models were compared with the experimental values. The results showed that the BP (with thermal) model had the highest prediction accuracy of phase parameters and amplitude parameters of combustion. Meanwhile, RBF (with thermal) model had the highest prediction accuracy of emission parameters. The mean absolute percentage errors (MAPE) were mostly lower than 0.25, which proved a high accuracy of the proposed ion current-based virtual sensor for detecting the key combustion parameters.