Practical Standalone Tuning: Step 8: Steady State Ignition Tuning

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Step 8: Steady State Ignition Tuning

25.27

00:00	For the next step of our process we're going to be steady state tuning our ignition table.
00:04	And the process here really looks very similar to what we've just done with our fuel.
00:08	What we're going to be doing here is using the torque feedback from our mainline dyno and we've also got our ignition timing coming into the dyno via canned communication.
00:17	So, if we head over to our dyno screen, what we can see here is we have our ignition timing coming through here, we can see we're just sitting at idle and our idle ignition control is functioning and the blue here is our engine torque, obviously the car is not running on the dyno, so it's currently registering zero torque.
00:37	So, the process we're going to go through is to start at low RPM and low load.
00:41	We'll start at about 1500 RPM here instead of 1000, this is very difficult to run the car accurately at 1000 RPM and the amount of torque that we're going to be producing at 1000 RPM and light load really isn't enough to give us good resolution on the dyno anyway.
00:56	So, we'll start at 1500 RPM and we will do some interpolation back down to deal with the 1000 RPM column once we're finished.
01:05	We're going to be sitting central in the cell, we're going to be advancing the timing in two degree increments and looking for our changes in torque.
01:12	This can get a little difficult to actually register the changes, it's difficult to stay absolutely perfectly central in the cell in the first place and the torque value is a little bit of a noisy signal, so sometimes it can be a little tricky to really see if a two degree change did in fact result in more torque or less torque or maybe we just plateaued.
01:33	It's always easy enough though to go back and forth, if you're not confident that you saw a change or maybe you moved your foot on the throttle a little bit, that's OK, we can just go back and try again.
01:43	When we do get to the point though where we're struggling to really see the difference, if two degrees made any difference to our torque, at that point we have to also be realistic that if we're really struggling to see if we picked up maybe one or two pound foot of torque, then at the same time it's really not going to be relevant because we're not going to notice that on the road.
02:02	While I'm doing this I will initially start to demonstrate the process for a couple of columns.
02:07	I won't be using our audio knock detection equipment.
02:11	However, once I start getting higher in the RPM I will switch to the audio knock detection equipment and I will speed up the process.
02:18	I would always encourage you to use audio knock detection equipment regardless and if I wasn't presenting in our steady state fuel tuning, I would have been using audio knock detection equipment then.
02:29	Even though we started with conservative safe ignition timing numbers, there's no guarantee that we got that right everywhere and we may have found some areas where the engine was a little bit prone to knock.
02:39	A couple of things I'll just cover off before we get going here.
02:43	If we jump into our software, we can see that in the bottom right hand corner I've got our closed loop fuel control switched back on.
02:49	This is a personal preference, you don't necessarily have to do it, we've just come from steady state tuning our fueling, so it should be pretty accurate.
02:56	But we may see variations of perhaps 1% or 2% here and there.
03:00	This will allow the ECU to basically pick up any slack there, make sure that our fueling is on point and that way we're going to be also certain that our fueling is not impacting on our torque reading.
03:12	Another point I'll make here is that when we are trying to be central in a cell, it can be very difficult to actually see where we are with the colour coding of our map here.
03:24	So, we're looking for our crosshairs to see exactly where we are in the cell.
03:27	If we press the H key and turn that off, you can see it's much much clearer when we have that colour gradient turned off.
03:33	This is a little bit of a personal preference, but for the purposes of our demonstration here we're going to leave that switched off.
03:39	So, for now let's get ourselves up and running on the dyno and we'll get started.
03:44	Alright, so we're up and running here in our 60 kPa 1500 RPM cell.
03:49	And from our last step we could get down into our 40 kPa cell when we were dialling in the fueling, but at this point it's very difficult to get central in that cell and there is a bit of interpolation going on, the bigger issue is at that point we've barely got enough torque to keep the dyno running, dyno actually turning.
04:06	So, at this point we're essentially going to have no resolution in our torque reading and it's going to be almost an impossibility to make any changes that actually make any sense on our dyno.
04:16	So, we're going to start at 60 kPa and even here's going to be quite sensitive, so it could be a little bit tricky and I'll show you how we're going to deal with those cells that we can't access a little bit later on.
04:27	So, let's head over to the dyno screen and have a look at what we've got there.
04:30	So, as you can see at the moment we're sitting at about 33 pound foot, I'll just make sure that I am absolutely central in the cell, yeah 31, 32 pound foot.
04:41	So, what we're going to do is enter a value of 17.
04:44	Now, this change will not take place until I press the enter key, so what we're going to do is look, to make sure that we are central in the cell, that our torque is consistent and what we're looking for is when we press the enter key, what actually happens to our torque? So, we can see, we saw a small increase there, we're up to 35 pound foot of torque, 36, actually, 37, but I've just moved the throttle a little bit.
05:08	So, we did see a positive change, I'll just drop the throttle back down, so I'm central again in that cell or as close as I can get.
05:15	Again looking at our torque, 36, 37 pound foot, I'll press enter and we see that our torque again does jump up slightly, up around 37 to 38 pound foot.
05:26	Now, so we're going in the right direction, we'll try 21 degrees, I'll press enter now and didn't really see much of a change there, potentially a very small increase, we're actually, up at 38 to 39 pound foot now.
05:41	What I can do now is just come back to 19 degrees and my foot has just crept up a little bit on the throttle there, so we can see that we're not quite central in the cell, so we'll just get ourselves back central, we'll go back to 19 degrees and we'll just repeat that change so, we're at 19 degrees now, I'll enter the value 21, looking at our torque, sitting about 35 pound foot now, press enter and we did see a small increase there to about 36 pound foot.
06:08	At this point we are starting to split here though, I will try 23, but at this point I'm not expecting to see any real improvement.
06:16	Enter 23 and yeah we're really just exactly the same, so we'll come back to 21 and we'll leave that cell as it is.
06:25	Alright, so what we're going to do now is increase our throttle opening and we will come to our 80 kPa cell and again we're just going to make sure that we are nice and central in that cell.
06:35	So, 15 degrees at the moment, we can see we've got 72, 73 pound foot, we'll enter a value of 17, press enter and we see that our torque has increased just as we'd expect.
06:48	Enter a value of 19 here, so we're sitting at 77, 78 pound foot, press enter.
06:54	Yeah we've got up to 79 to 80 pound foot, so another improvement there.
06:59	And we'll try 21 degrees here, we'll just get again central in that cell, 79 pound foot, pressing enter and yeah we've ended up pretty much exactly the same point, 79 pound foot.
07:12	So, what I'll do is go back to 19 there and we will leave that cell as it is.
07:17	Let's increase our throttle now and we'll come up to our 100 kPa site.
07:23	And we're seeing sort of about a two degree change there per 20 kPa, so I've got an idea that I probably would be expecting to see somewhere around about 17 degrees in this cell.
07:33	So, we'll enter 17 at the moment, looking at our torque, 112, we'll press enter.
07:39	We're going up to 113, 114, yep small improvement, but very very small.
07:45	We'll enter a value of 19, look at our 112, 113, pressing enter.
07:51	Yeah no change at all, so as we'd expect there, 17 degrees.
07:55	We'll see how far we can get up to our next cell here, 120 kPa, not quite in the centre of it but we've got 10 degrees in there at the moment, so let's enter a value of 12, there's going to be a little bit of interpolation because we're not central in the cell, but this is the best we can do at such low RPM.
08:10	So, we'll press enter, now we're looking at 145, 146 pound foot, press enter.
08:17	Went up to 147, so yep we're going in the right direction.
08:20	We'll try 14 degrees here.
08:22	So, still 146, 145.
08:29	Really didn't see any change there at all.
08:32	So, we can come back to our 12 degrees there and leave it as it is.
08:36	OK, so we have only been able to really dial in a handful of cells here.
08:41	As we explained, we can't get our load lower to get into our 40 kPa cell and we can't obviously make more boost to get above 120 kPa, we weren't quite there anyway.
08:53	So, what we can do here is basically a little bit of hand smoothing.
08:57	We know that we've got around about a 2 degree per 20 kPa change, so it's safe to assume here that at 40 kPa we're probably going to want at least 21 degrees if not a little more.
09:08	I'm just going to basically set these cells here to 23 degrees.
09:12	That's going to be pretty conservative, I'm just following that trend and that should have us pretty close.
09:18	At the same time, we do want to also follow the trends that we're seeing out into the untuned areas.
09:23	We can't get to them here, but because we're going to be copying this column across to 2000 RPM, we do want to factor this in.
09:30	It looks like we're probably not too far out of the ballpark here, remember these are just numbers that we'd guessed.
09:36	So, what I'm going to do is just take this particular cell here down to 6 degrees, and we're going to, sorry 8 degrees, and we're going to leave the rest of them as they are.
09:46	So, at this point we'll copy our 1500 RPM column using CTRL C, come across to 2000 and CTRL V.
09:53	Now, at this point I'm not going to be adding additional timing even though I'm pretty confident as I move from 1500 to 2000 RPM the general trend would allow a little bit more timing to be crept in there, but we want to start from a place where we are nice and safe with retarded ignition timing.
10:11	So, let's jump our dyno up to 2000 RPM and we'll go ahead and tune the 2000 RPM column.
10:23	OK, again we're just going to be starting at our 60 kPa cell, no point trying to get down into our 40 kPa cell.
10:32	21 degrees in there at the moment, looking at our dyno, we've got about 35, 36 pound foot of torque, so we'll enter a value of 23.
10:41	Looking at that dyno readout, 36 to 37 now, maybe even 38, just make sure I am central in the cell and I am.
10:49	And we'll press enter and we see our torque jump up very slightly, we're up to 40 now.
10:55	So, we'll try adding another couple of degrees, we'll go to 25 degrees, again just making sure that we are nice and central in the cell.
11:03	37 pound foot, 36, 37.
11:07	Yeah we're really not seeing much in the way of a change there, so I'm going to go back to 23 degrees.
11:13	Now, I'm also going to add two degrees to the cells above, again we're not going to be able to get to them, but we're just going to want to start there basically extrapolating out the change we've seen in the 60 kPa cell.
11:28	Right, let's come down to our 80 kPa cell and obviously the trend that we're seeing here, if we find that the 60 kPa cell wanted an additional two degrees, we can take an educated guess that probably that trend is going to continue through the rest of the cells but that's not always the case.
11:47	Let's just try adding in another couple of degrees here at 80 kPa, again I'm just making sure, I'm central, we've got 80 to 81 pound foot of torque, press enter, we've jumped up to 82 to 83, so yep that's a move in the right direction.
12:01	Very small though, so again I know I'm on that plateau.
12:04	We'll enter 23, just again making sure I'm nice and consistent here.
12:09	And yeah we've seen no change, so we'll go back to 21 degrees there.
12:16	Coming down to our 100 kPa cell, currently we've got 17 degrees in there.
12:21	So, there's a pretty good chance it's probably going to want to be around 19.
12:24	We'll just let our torque stabilise here, about 118 to 100, maybe a little bit more.
12:34	119 to 120, I'll press enter, jump it to 120, but it's such a small change, you can almost be certain here that adding another two degrees is not going to help our case.
12:44	But for the sake of completeness let's try that.
12:47	Yeah just plateaued there, so again 19 degrees.
12:51	OK, we'll come down to our 120 kPa cell, about 12 degrees in there at the moment.
12:59	We'll enter a value of 14, just let our dyno stabilise there, 158, 159, maybe 160.
13:08	Pound foot, it's moving around a little bit, press enter.
13:12	We've jumped up there to about 160, 162, we'll try 16 degrees here, press enter.
13:19	Yep, no change there, so we'll go back to 14 degrees.
13:23	Now, this one we might be able to get up to 140 kPa, we've got 10 degrees in there at the moment, I'm now at wide open throttle.
13:29	We'll enter a value of 12 here, about 195, 196, 195 pound foot, just waiting for it to stabilise, we'll press enter.
13:43	It picked up a little bit, 196, no we really haven't seen much of a change, let's just test that again, we'll go back to 10 degrees.
13:52	OK, we did actually see our torque drop away very slightly there when I immediately hit that enter key, so we'll try going back to 12 degrees.
14:02	196 pound foot, yeah we've jumped up to 197.
14:07	So, again we are splitting here, so we can try 14 degrees here, we'll press enter.
14:16	We're sort of just going around in circles there.
14:18	The torque is varying, but it's, so so small that we, again we're chasing maybe one pound foot of torque.
14:26	It's really not worth it, I'd always want to be conservative with my ignition timing here rather than trying to chase every last pound foot of torque.
14:34	Alright, so again just looking at our trends sort of as we move down here, as we're sort of starting to get further out into the positive boost areas, there's nothing necessarily wrong with leaving our 160 kPa site at 8 degrees.
14:48	If our trend does continue and there's nothing to say it would, it's most likely that that might be a little conservative for maybe we can creep 10 degrees in here.
14:56	But again for the sake of being conservative, I'm quite happy to leave that, so what we'll do is press Control C and Control V will copy that out to 2500 RPM.
15:06	So, at this point we're going to be able to move further into positive boost because the turbo is now, receiving more exhaust gas energy and this does make it more likely that we're going to be able to suffer from knock.
15:17	So, at this point we're going to use audio knock detection equipment, we're going to speed up this process and again just like we did with our fuel, we're going to steady state tune out to 4500 RPM.
17:11	Alright, just going to take a moment out here and just talk about my thought process here.
17:16	And again this is a tricky process to be super accurate with because we are looking at very very small changes and obviously there is noise on that torque trace as well.
17:27	It's not a rock solid number, so there is a little bit of toing and froing here just to make sure, that we are correct with our timing table.
17:36	And the other thing I always look for here is any large jumps or inconsistencies in the table that I don't expect to see, this can be a sign that maybe we haven't got ourselves quite right.
17:47	And we've seen here in our 3000 RPM column that this time we've been jumping up, rather than about 2° per cell, we've actually been jumping up closer to about 4° per cell.
17:59	Nothing necessarily wrong with that.
18:00	What we do find here is that we've got 16° in this particular cell here at 2500 RPM and the engine's warmed to 22° here at 3000 RPM.
18:11	It's unusual to see a 6° jump across a 500 RPM range at a fixed load like this.
18:18	So, this is a bit of a red flag for me, it's not a problem though.
18:21	All we're going to do is just pop back to 2500 RPM and just test and see, I'm guessing that chances are I may want to end up with more like 18° or 19° in this particular cell, but let's just go back and have another look and see if I'm right.
18:37	Or potentially I could be over advanced at 3000 RPM.
18:41	Both of those scenarios could prove to be accurate.
18:49	Alright, so I'm just making sure again as usual that I am nice and central in the cell.
18:54	And we're looking at about 164, 165 pound foot, let's go to 18° here, I'll press enter.
19:05	And we actually have picked up to about 167, so yep it was under advanced.
19:10	So, let's try 20° here.
19:17	We haven't seen any change at 20°.
19:19	So, I mean we are splitting here, it's not a big change, but we've ended up at 18°.
19:25	I could also smooth that out because there's no knock to 19°.
19:28	Now, that's not giving me more torque, but what it does do is it just smooths out the table, so I don't have big steps between adjacent cells.
19:37	Big steps between adjacent cells can end up creating a poor drivability experience.
19:42	So, yeah we're not always going to get it perfectly right first time around because we are dealing with something that is very sensitive and difficult to do.
19:51	But again if we're looking for these red flags, we can always come back and retest and find whether we were right or wrong.
19:58	Alright, we'll carry on with the process now it being sped up.
21:53	Alright, I'm actually going to stop there, we're at 4500 RPM, but I've only gone up to 120 kPa.
22:00	And the reason I've stopped there is that we're starting to build a lot of heat understandably once we get into the positive boost pressure areas.
22:07	I've had to stop a couple of times now and allow the car to come back to a stop, to idle, allow the temperatures to stabilise again.
22:15	This is normal and it is important that you're always monitoring both your intake air temperature and coolant temperatures during this process.
22:22	But what I've seen here, so far in all of the cells that I have tuned is essentially no change from what we had at 4000 RPM.
22:31	So, what I know is that we're very very close to the ballpark anyway.
22:34	So, there's no point really beating up on the engine and putting any undue stress and strain on it when I will be able to tune these cells out here on the wide open throttle during our ramp run, full power tuning which we're going to get into next.
22:48	So, at this point I'm quite happy with what I've done out to 4500 RPM.
22:53	What we're going to do now is basically address the rest of the table.
22:57	So, I will turn our colour gradient back on here, so we can sort of see what's going on.
23:02	What we've got at 4500 RPM, within reason we should expect the engine to accept that or more timing as we move to higher RPM.
23:09	So, I'm just going to highlight the 4000 RPM column, hold down the control key and the right arrow key and that will just copy everything out or extrapolate everything out there.
23:20	Now, I'm pretty comfortable with everything else that we've got in the table.
23:23	However, I did mention that we do need to have a look and address the 1000 RPM column.
23:30	There's a couple of ways of doing this, we can hand smooth between our idle areas which at the moment we've got 15°, I'm actually going to punch this up a little bit to 16°, sort of splitting hairs and we are using idle ignition control anyway, so it becomes a little bit of a moot point.
23:46	Now, what we're going to do here is simply highlight the 850 RPM column through the 1500 RPM column, so I've got all of those highlighted and then we'll use the shift and H key and that will do a horizontal interpolation between those values.
24:01	And remember if you forget your hotkeys you can always right click and you can come down to interpolate and interpolate horizontal is what we've just used.
24:11	Let's have a quick look at that map graphically as well and just see if there's any sort of horrible inconsistencies in there.
24:17	Everything is looking reasonably tidy there, I'm quite happy with this.
24:22	If you've got anything obvious, we do actually have an area here which is a bit of a moot point because we'll never get here, but for the sake of completeness we can address that.
24:31	We need to just have a quick look around the map and make sure there's nothing else.
24:35	Yeah we've got this area where we've sort of gone from a high number to a low number, so let's go back to our actual values and look at that.
24:44	And yeah this is the area here, we can see, just highlight that for you.
24:51	So, again a bit of a moot point, we're not ever gonna be able to get to 160 kPa at 500 RPM so this is just sort of for the sake of keeping myself happy with the sort of shape of the map so, we'll just do a little bit of hand blending here and we might want to take a degree out of here as well.
25:10	We can now have a look at that again graphically and we can see yep that's all looking much better now.
25:18	Alright, so at this point we've got our ignition table set up, we can move on to the next step of our process.