Virtual Sensing in Mechatronic Systems. State Estimation using System Level Models

In vehicle and machine industry, there is an ever increasing demand for stricter requirements with respect to performance, energy and cost efficiency etc. Moreover, due to the competitive nature of the market, these specifications need to be fulfilled within a limited time frame to keep the time-to-market as short as possible. This has led to a general trend towards reducing the amount of resources during the design process as well as during the operational lifetime. The traditional approach of experiment based redesign is both expensive and time-consuming hence cannot satisfy these developments. Therefore, model based design and efficient prototype testing and validation is an approach that is gaining more and more entry in the state of the use. The use of models allows us to evaluate design criteria concurrently and to frontload the design changes in the development phase. In this dissertation, the author increments this approach by offering a framework for system level modeling in combination with efficient prototype testing and validation through virtual sensing techniques. This idea is applied to a conjugate cam mechanism.