Development of the Dynamometer Control System for Medium Speed Diesel Engines

The dynamometers which had made in a long time ago could not control the input/output quantity of water minutely and was sensitive to a noise since it was controlled by an analog control method. Therefore, a fully digital controlled system was urgently required to be robust against various noises. In this paper, the new system which can control the amount of circulated water in dynamometer was developed. This system is consisted of an industrial digital type controller and a servo motor. The industrial PLC was used as a main controller for the developed system, and the actuator and servo motor were used to control the inlet and outlet valve independently. The torque signal of load cell was fed back to the main controller to regulate the diesel engines load. Generally, an input/output valve position of the old dynamometer was fixed with a proper situation for an engine output test and the torque was changed according to the time interval. However, the torque value for the dynamometer could not be constantly kept because of the variation of the input water flow and fluid characteristic. Therefore, the automatic control of an inlet and outlet valve should be performed to keep the constant torque. So, the PID control method was applied to solve this problem. Also, the development of a web-based remote control system was described in this paper. This software will give us the convenience of operation, the more efficient operations, and the reduced operator workload for operation of the dynamometer. The application results of the system have been verified at actual diesel engine field.