Project Information

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Project Reference: 207 
Title Diesel Engine Controller for Harsh Environments  
Project Status: inprogress  
 
Proposer's Name: Ben Wilkie 
Company/University: BAE Systems 
Phone: 07793424485 
Email: ben.wilkie@baesystems.com 
Proposal Date: 21/10/2009 
Brief description
The MSc course which I am enrolled upon is titled Electronic Product Development, for this reason I intend to carry out a project which develops an Electronic Product. The idea for the project is work inspired rather than work based. One of the projects I have worked on utilises a 4 cylinder diesel engine with a commercial off the shelf engine controller. In my opinion this was not an optimum solution for the application. Therefore, for my MSc project I would like to develop an engine controller for use in a harsh environment, i.e. Engineering mobile vehicle systems such as Excavators, Tractors, Hydraulic Lifting equipment etc. The project would involve a review of existing products in the market place and would include a feasability study of the new product. Ultimately the research aspect would be used to derive a set of requirements for the product development. The main outputs from the project would be a set of design data for the electronic hardware, design data for the enclosure and the actual software code which will be able to be demonstrated on a development board. I would also propose to carry out COMSOL based simulations for EMC / EMI issues to derive an optimum enclosure solution. Please get in touch for further specific information. 
Project outcomes
ASIC to be fabricated No 
Hardware to be produced No  
Software to be produced Yes  
Requirements
Dedicated hardware that will be essential for the project. I plan to use either a PIC micro development board as used for the Microcontrollers module or a development board I have obtained at work which contains an Infineon C167CR Microcontroller. If I use the PIC development board I may require an alternative PIC to the 16F version usually supplied in order to demonstrate the software functionality. However, I am leaning towards using the infineon item as this has sufficient capacity for what I aim to achieve. It also has options for plug in boards which I could use to develop some specific I/O for demonstrating the software. The infineon unit details are shown at: http://www.phytec.com/products/sbc/C166-xc166-st10-xa/miniMODUL-167.html 
Specialist software that will be essential for the project. If I use the PIC microboard I will require the MPLAB software which I still have installed on my PC from the microcontrollers module. If I use the Infineon item I shall require the Keil programming software which I hope to secure from work. I will also have to utilise the COMSOL software to demonstrate EMC influences on the design of the unit enclosure. 
Staff comments
Started Jan 2010. ADT is supervisor 

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