Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 3: Base Table Configuration

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Step 3: Base Table Configuration

16.00

00:00	The next step of our process is to go through and configure our base tables.
00:04	This is just intending to get ourselves set up with some numbers in our tables and some breakpoints in our tables that make sense and should be good enough to get us running.
00:13	They don't have to be perfect right now and as you'll see as we move through the worked example, it's very easy to come back and manipulate these table breakpoints as we see fit and of course we're going to be manipulating the numbers within the tables anyway.
00:26	We'll have a little bit of a tour as well of the NSP software which we really haven't done, so far.
00:31	And we can see in our menu structure over here on the left hand side, we've got this section labelled favourites and we've got three tables that I've placed into favourites which are the ones I'm going to be using the most.
00:42	At the moment we've got our base fuel tuning which is essentially our volumetric efficiency table, we've got our base ignition table which is for our ignition timing and then in between we've got our target lambda table as well.
00:53	So, we can add any tables we want into our favourites, so for example if we come across to fuel tuning and maybe we wanted to add our cranking table into the favourites to make it easy to find, if we right click on this, we can click add to favourites and if we decide that we don't want that anymore, we can click on it and click remove from favourites.
01:14	Alright, so let's have a look at how this is laid out and most of it to me makes sense with one minor aspect that I don't like which is by default we see that the RPM is on the vertical axis.
01:27	Personal preference completely and you could absolutely get used to tuning like this, or at least I could get used to tuning like this, but this is kind of counter intuitive from just about every other aftermarket standalone ECU that I do tune.
01:40	We can easily change that though if you'd like to, if we right click here, we can come down to swap columns and it says visual only.
01:49	Now, I've got something that at least makes a little bit more sense to me.
01:52	So, that's how I prefer to have my tables set up, but again completely up to the individual.
01:58	Now, we want to basically set up our breakpoints and make sure that the inputs make sense.
02:03	So, we can do that by clicking on our little table axis setup icon or pressing F3.
02:10	So, on our horizontal axis now, at X axis we have RPM as our parameter which obviously makes sense.
02:18	We can come through and manipulate the values in this table.
02:21	As you know from the body of the course, I generally recommend having breakpoints about every 500 RPM, can be useful to have a breakpoint closer to the actual idle target which is what we can see here, 850 RPM, that's probably about where I'm going to have this engine idling.
02:36	We've also got an additional breakpoint here at 1250 RPM and I just find that it can be beneficial to have another breakpoint in here just as we transition away from idle and start moving.
02:48	We've got one here at 1750 which I doubt we really do need.
02:53	So, we can click delete values and that will remove that.
02:56	And I like to make sure that I'm spanning out to around about 500 RPM past my rev limiter and we can see that's exactly what we've got.
03:04	We'll have a red line of 7500 RPM and we've got our last breakpoint at 8000 RPM.
03:12	When it comes to our load axis here, we've got manifold absolute pressure selected here and again generally around about every 20 kPa is something that makes sense and gives us sufficient resolution without making more work than we need to.
03:29	A lot of tuners will think that more breakpoints is going to give us a better result but we do need to remember that the ECU will interpolate.
03:36	So, I've got a few breakpoints here that are probably a little bit unnecessary.
03:40	So, again we can just delete some of these.
03:42	It is beneficial to have a little bit more resolution again around our idle point.
03:47	So, at the moment I'm not quite sure where we're going to end up, probably not quite at minus 70 kPa, so we'll delete that, we can add some in here.
03:54	We'll leave one here at minus 50 kPa.
03:57	But again we don't probably need quite, so tight resolution as we've got here.
04:02	And into positive boost we are moving out here to 200 kPa which is more than sufficient for where we're going to end up.
04:11	In fact, I can probably delete a couple of these because we're going to run probably around about 140 kPa absolute maximum.
04:17	So, I'll leave that spanning out to 180, that'll interpolate the table out to suit.
04:23	And we've obviously already got values in here, what I'm going to do is click in the top left square here and we'll just set for the moment the entire table there to a value of 50% VE.
04:33	And again this should be enough to get us up and running although clearly it's not going to be perfect.
04:39	Alright, we'll move to our base ignition table here and we're going to essentially go through the same thing.
04:43	So, again I'm just going to swap our column and rows around and we'll click on our little table axis setup and just make sure that we've got our resolution where we need it.
04:55	Don't need to be quite, so tight with our ignition timing, so I don't really usually need to have any additional resolution in our RPM axis around that idle area.
05:07	And if we look at our load here, so we've actually got ignition load map as our axis, that's something I overlooked on our last one, so we'll have a quick look at this.
05:17	So, if we type in ignition load, so basically this is just going to take whatever parameter we have set up for our load axis for our ignition and by default here this is manifold absolute pressure.
05:30	So, we can choose that or we can select a specific parameter as our input.
05:36	If we're using ignition load like this though, if we change our load axis from manifold absolute pressure to throttle position, this will change the axis automatically.
05:46	So, we don't really need to think too much more about that.
05:49	But again just having a look at our break points here, we've probably got a slightly tighter resolution than what we actually need, so we'll just go through and remove a few of these cells here.
05:59	And again we probably don't need to be spanning all the way up to 200 kPa, we'll click OK.
06:04	Now, we need to get some numbers into the table here and with the 4G63, although in our instance with the MPD100 Plus that we're going to be running this on, it's unlikely that we're going to have much trouble with knock or detonation.
06:19	On lower grades of pump fuel, the 4G63 can be quite prone to knock around the high peak torque area, maybe around 3500 to 4500 RPM, so we do want to be a little bit mindful of that.
06:32	So, what are we going to do with this table? Well, for a start let's set the entirety of the table to 15°.
06:37	What I'm going to do just on that basis is I'm going to span out to about 3500 RPM here and we'll set the timing down to 5°, I've probably gone a little bit more conservative than I need to here and we'll try that to 10° and then I will also change it from 4000 RPM and above out to 10°.
07:00	Just being a little bit more conservative because I know these engines can be quite prone to knock and again just because I know that 15° is going to be very very conservative in the vacuum areas, we'll just set that to 20°.
07:13	Now, these numbers are just a starting point and this is something that we can easily change if we find that during our steady state fuel tuning we start encountering some knock as we move into positive boost, we can simply stop, come back to idle and we can pull some more timing out even though we are concentrating on the fuelling.
07:31	So, this is very fluid and we can change it very quickly as we need.
07:36	Let's move over to our target lambda table and we've got a table here that's probably got a lot more resolution than we actually need, particularly given that at the moment it's spanning all the way out to 10, 000 RPM which is probably pretty optimistic for our stock 4G63, so again we'll open our axis setup here and we can remove our 10, 000 RPM column for a start.
07:59	In this case we probably don't even need to have the break points as close as they are.
08:04	We can see that up until 4500 RPM we do have every 500 RPM and then we move 2000 RPM increments.
08:12	The reason we don't need tight resolution with this particular table is simply because we're not changing our lambda target as frequently as for example our ignition timing.
08:23	Looking at our manifold absolute pressure axis, this is probably set up pretty much like I'd expect and again we'll just remove some unnecessary values well above the boost pressure that we ever expect to run and we'll click OK.
08:38	Alright, that's got something that looks a little bit more sensible here.
08:41	So, again the numbers that we put into this table aren't forever values, we can change these as we see fit, remembering that because this is a volumetric efficiency based fuel model, the workflow is that we need to set this target lambda table to numbers that we actually wanna be achieving and then we tune the VE table until we achieve them.
09:00	So, these numbers do need to be at least in the ballpark, but the beauty of the VE based tuning model is that if we want to experiment with a different air fuel ratio and see how the engine responds, instead of retuning the VE table, we can simply come here and adjust the values in this particular table and we'll achieve our, or if everything is set correctly, we'll achieve our target air fuel ratio.
09:23	Alright, let's look at the specific numbers that I've got in here and these are pretty much a good starting point I think for what we're trying to achieve.
09:30	We can see here that basically minus 20 kPa and below, all the way up to 4500 RPM, I've set the lambda target to lambda one, 14.7 to one, our stoic air fuel ratio for pump gas.
09:43	So, this is gonna give us reasonably good fuel economy.
09:46	And we can see at the higher RPM, above 5000 RPM, I've actually richened this up to 0.95 and I like to do this on engines that are going to be driven hard because if we're constantly above 5000 RPM in this operating area, that would tend to suggest the engine is being driven hard and by richening our targets here, this will allow us to add a little bit of additional fuel to help cool and control our combustion charge temperature.
10:11	As we move up this table we're increasing our load or moving into positive boost pressure from 0 kPa and above.
10:18	So, 0 kPa I'm targeting 0.95 and essentially we're just smoothly richening this up until we hit 0.78 at 100 kPa.
10:28	Arguably possibly a little bit richer than we need to run, but once we get into the actual tuning we can always experiment with our air fuel ratio target and see how the engine responds.
10:39	But for now these numbers are quite sensible for what we're trying to achieve.
10:43	Now, I have already shown this, but if we come up to our preferences drop down menu and click on the units options, we can change this over to AFR units if you prefer viewing AFR numbers, I'll show you this now, so you can get a sense of the targets that I am choosing.
10:59	However, for the rest of the worked example we will switch back to lambda.
11:04	We'll click OK there.
11:06	So, now I've got the three core maps configured, so we've got base values into them, that should give us a sensible starting point.
11:15	There's a couple of other aspects I just want to deal with in this particular step as well.
11:19	So, what we're going to do is come down to our engine functions here and we're going to come down to our main limiter.
11:27	So, this is our engine RPM limiter and we want to make sure that this is set up to something sensible as well before we try starting the engine.
11:34	So, we can see our cut method actually by default on this base map is set to ignition.
11:40	I prefer to actually have this set to injection, you can see we have to do a reboot when we change that.
11:45	So, the reason being that an ignition cut can be quite hard on certain valve trains.
11:51	The 4G63, not, so bad, but some can be quite easily damaged, particularly SR20DE and DET.
11:59	You can easily pop a rocker off using an ignition cut limiter, so it's always safest to use an injection limiter there.
12:05	If we come down and open up our menu structure here, we'll see our end RPM and we can see that this has actually got vehicle speed as an axis input which I don't really think we need here, so we can easily remove that and click OK.
12:20	So, at the moment coolant temperature is our axis and we can change our RPM limiter based on coolant temperature, the idea being of course that we can prevent the engine being driven excessively hard at lower coolant temperatures.
12:35	And what I'm going to do for a start is just set the entirety of this table to let's say 5000 RPM and this just means that if we have any issues with our throttle sticking or maybe there's a massive air leak when we first start the engine, it's not going to just sit there revving at 7000 RPM.
12:52	If we do make this change, obviously this is quite conservative, we just need to keep this in mind when we come to actually running the engine and performing ramp runs to make sure that we raise this once we're comfortable that we've got control of our engine RPM.
13:07	Otherwise, we're going to end up just simply hitting our rev limiter.
13:11	Now, the other aspect I'll just check and set here is our overboost cut, very important with any turbocharged engine.
13:19	So, again I'd recommend the cut method here set to fuel.
13:23	Really important that we consider our delay here, so a delay before the cut comes in, this can be set to allow a minor overboost before the boost control actually settles in.
13:35	We do need to be really careful with this because if you have a delay of even maybe 200 milliseconds, if the boost control is completely out of control, we can end up with the boost rising quite sharply even in .2 of a second, so I'm going to set that to zero.
13:51	And then our hysteresis here, so basically once the boost has cut, what does it need to drop by in order to re enable our fuel injection at this point? So, basically here we've got a 10 kPa hysteresis.
14:03	Alright, so then we can open this up and actually look at our cut pressure.
14:07	This can be set on a axis of course, we could come here and enable an axis and we could use a coolant temperature there and we can set a start temperature and maybe a finish temperature and the number of increments of value.
14:26	Let's just start here by setting the entirety of that table to one bar of positive boost or 100 kPa, call it 15 psi, it's going to again be a nice safe starting point that's going to mean that if we do have a problem with our boost control, that this is going to step in and prevent any potential damage.
14:43	Now, this also goes hand in hand with our actual boost control.
14:47	And for this worked example I'm not going to be heavily diving into setting up the boost control, I want to keep this worked example fairly simple and there are webinars in our archive that cover the intricacies of setting up boost control, but for the purposes of our demonstration here what we're going to do is come into our engine functions here and boost control and we want to come into our open loop duty cycle table and you can see that's currently set to 100%, what I'm going to do is just start by setting that all to zero.
15:18	So, that should give us our minimum boost pressure.
15:21	Another way of doing this is to simply disable the boost control solenoid, you can just unplug it, but we always want to start with our minimum boost that we can achieve, or our wastegate spring pressure, so that's going to achieve that.
15:33	So, at this point we've got our base fuel or VE table set, we've got our ignition table set up, we've also got our lambda targets set, we've gone through and made sure that we've got a rev limiter enabled, that it's set correctly and we've also got a boost cut set up and our boost output is going to be demanding minimum boost.
15:53	So, at this point we're ready to move on with the next step of our process.