The development of an electronic control system for diesel–natural gas dual-fuel engine

To meet the actual application requirements for the diesel–natural gas dual-fuel engine refit, a new electronic control system for the dual-fuel engine is developed in the study. Specifically, an active mode switching board is developed to achieve flexible switching between the pure diesel mode and dual-fuel mode. A diesel nozzle physical simulator is developed to ensure that the original diesel electronic control unit does not trigger fault alarm when engine works in the dual-fuel mode. Moreover, a dual-fuel electronic control unit, which uses the high-speed and multicore TMS320F28M35 as its microcontroller unit, is additionally developed on the basis of the original diesel electronic control unit. The peak and hold current shape for the diesel nozzle is intelligently controlled by the software program in C2000 core. Experiments reveal that the developed electronic control system can select a proper working mode according to the engine operation condition and smoothly switch the working mode without any fault alarms.