Barron Associates Completes Successful Diesel Engine Cylinder Output Balancing Experiments

Cylinder power output imbalance is ubiquitous in internal combustion engines and imparts potentially damaging vibrations that can reduce engine component life.  Barron Associates and Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) have successfully completed testing of a prototype Adaptive Inverse Control System (AICS) for Inter-Cylinder Output Balancing.  The AICS prototype diagnosed and mitigated severe and subtle imbalance conditions in real time using only stock engine sensors with the custom control software.  The experiments were conducted in SwRI’s diesel engine test facility using a highly-instrumented Navistar six cylinder diesel engine.  These initial results are highly encouraging regarding the efficacy of the feedback signal processing techniques and adaptive control methods developed by Barron Associates.