Camless internal combustion engines offer improvements over traditional engines in terms of torque performance, reduction of emissions, reduction of pumping losses and fuel economy. Theoretically, electromagnetic valve actuators offer the highest potentials for improving efficiency due to their control flexibility. For real applications, however, the valve actuators developed so far suffer from high power consumption and other control problems. One key point for the control is the design of the reference trajectory to be tracked by the closed loop controller. In this paper an optimal trajectory design technique aimed at minimizing power consumption is proposed. An optimization problem that explicitly considers the physical constraints of the system is formulated and a suboptimal solution is derived by exploiting local flatness of the system

Camless internal combustion engines offer improvements over traditional engines in terms of torque performance reduction of emissions, reduction of pumping losses, fuel economy. Theoretically, electromagnetic valve actuators offer the highest potentials for improving efficiency due to their control flexibility. Sensorless control is one of the most important issues with regard to real implementation of this new technology. This paper proposes an observer based on an extended Kalman filter to realize a sensorless control. Current is measured while position as well as velocity of the electromagnetic valve are estimated. Real data from a valve actuator prototype are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed method