The Rotation Rate Control System Of Air-powered Engine

With the development of modern industry, the problem of energy crisis and environmental pollution is becoming more serious. So energy conservation and emission reduction has become a global concern. Developing clean energy is paid more attention to, and developing air-powered engines has become one of the important measures to solve the problem.Air-powered engine is used to supply power through the expansion of high-pressure compressed air. The energy within the compressed air is converted to mechanical energy, which causes no pollution either in the production of raw materials or in the emission, and the compressed air will discharge itself into the air, which helps realize the purpose of zero consumption of raw material and meet the requirement of energy conservation and emission reduction.At present, studies at home and abroad on air-powered engine focuses on the mechanical system of air-powered engine, like the structure, the distribution system, and so on. In meeting the requirement of the operation control of the air-powered engine, the author presented a new method to control the rotating speed of the engine. During the research, the author accomplished the following tasks.(1) Based on the analysis of the engine’s working process and traditional control ways of controlling the rotating speed, a new method was put forward to control the engine’s rotating speed by controlling the amount of air into and out of the engine, and the algorithm was optimized.(2) A control system of the rotating speed of a single-cylinder air-powered engine was established, and bench tests were conducted in a single-cylinder air-powered engine, in which the proposed control scheme was tested.(3) The proposed engine rotation rate control method was applied in a four-cylinder air-powered engine. With the single chip microcomputer(SCM) PIC18F4525 as the controller, and the single spring Electromagnetic Valve Actuator as the actuator, the control system of the engine’s hardware and software was designed.(4) A bench test on a four-cylinder air-powered engine converted from a gasoline one was conducted to control the engine’s rotating speed and to test the effect of air pressure on the rotating speed.The results show that the proposed rotation rate control method can control the rotating speed of the engine. The test on the four-cylinder engine shows that the engine’s maximum rotating speed is 1340 r/min, and through the intake pressure control of the engine, the engine speed changes of the measured rate increases with inlet pressure increasing, decreases with the inlet pressure decreasing.