Terminal sliding mode control of rail pressure for gasoline direct injection engines

The desired fuel rail pressure is a crucial factor for guaranteeing the gasoline direct injection (GDI) engine to work stably. In order to solve the rail pressure control problem, the detailed nonlinear model of GDI is derived and reasonable simplification of this model is carried out for the following controller design. Terminal sliding mode control strategy is proposed to design the rail pressure controller with Lyapunov stability. The designed approach with the fast terminal sliding mode surface makes the system have the capacity of global fast convergence and achieves precise tracking control. To demonstrate the validity of the designed control method, simulations are conducted by tracking the different reference rail pressures. Results show that the designed controller tracks the given reference accurately and has strong robustness.