Ecotrons Engine Management

[speedpro]

I need to order an ALM and a couple of injectors. Rob is after some stuff as well. If anyone else wants to order some Ecotrons stuff shortly let me know and we can combine freight. Otherwise it's $50+- just for freight

[F5 Dave]

I need to order an ALM and a couple of injectors. Rob is after some stuff as well. If anyone else wants to order some Ecotrons stuff shortly let me know and we can combine freight. Otherwise it's $50+- just for freight

Have you used YouShop? Works well.

[TZ350]

Hi Speedpro, this is what I need



Two of these 128g injectors



And two lengths (1m??) each of the blue and clear fuel line that comes in the kit and one 25l pump.

[TZ350]

.

Posted so that those who want to try their hand at 2T EFI and Frits 24/7 concept can know their ambition is a realistic possibility.

There are a lot of good EFI ECU's around and Ecotrons sells inexpensive kits and parts, they are worth a look.

Riley Will of BRC is already achieving good results with EFI and so is Roland Holzner of Modena engines in Italy. The experimental 24/7 engine does not seem to care about the obligatory 30 mm inlet restriction.

Frits has posted some pictures of a working 24/7 setup.



EFI Kawasaki BigHorn running transfer port injection and E85. Runs to 8,000 rpm

Some more Youtube clips of transfer port injected 2T's
http://youtu.be/eleqBGvOM4M
http://youtu.be/hOGZ5llowoU
http://youtu.be/1YG9ko8-Nwk
http://youtu.be/UEQli7nuak4
GerbilGronk is worth a Youtube search.

I have been working on a EFI transfer port injection system of my own but trying to take the concept to 12,500rpm.

Attachment 306944 Pumper

With a pumper carb this engine reliably made 28hp at 12,250 rpm, with EFI, 24hp at 11,500rpm is the best so far and the EFI is short about 1,000 rpm.

Attachment 306943 EFI

I think that its becoming obvious that with transfer port injection, matching the timing of the injection cycle to the transfer port open period is vital.

I am finding transfer port injection above 9,000rpm is very difficult and I need to find another way to get to 12,500+rpm.

Below is an example of 15,000 rpm Inlet Port Injection.

Husa put me onto this post in PitLane http://translate.google.co.nz/transl...on&prev=search

It talks about split injection where a injector fires every second revolution, it may be the way forward. Husa reminded me that he had suggested it to me before ...

Gentlemen,

2 years ago I did an Indirect EFI project on a 125cc Disk Valve Kart Racing Engine. I used a Vortex FC engine which produced 49HP carbureted. With our EFI, it made 55HP!!! The engine was very easy to start and the tuning was very simple. Here is how I did it:

Rather than attach sensors to figure out the everything for me, I went with information that was known to me. I have been tuning Del'Lorto carbs for years and have used their needle charts along with various softwares that calculate Comparative MainJet Sizes at 10% throttle increments. I used this information to calculate an initial map for the injectors. I did a test on the carbureted version at each throttle position to note the EGT that was giving the correct performance. Once running with the EFI i tried to tune it to achieve the same EGT numbers as the carbureted version.

In total I ran for 3 hours on the dyno and ended up with 10% more power everywhere!

The only sensors I used were Throttle Position, Engine RPM, Crank Angle, and Water Temp for initial start up enrichment.

How did I get an injector to fire every cycle at 15000 rpm?????? I didnt! What I did is used a Janvey 41mm butterfly throttle body with 2 injectors on the engine side of the butterfly. That way when the throttle is closed, fuel still feeds the engine to lubricate it like a Pilot Jet would do. To get 15000 RPM, I had each injector firing at alternating engine revolutions. Thereby the injectors were seeing 7500 pulse at 15000rpm of engine speed. I tricked them into thinking this was a 2 cylinder 4 cycle engine firing in Tandem.

In total I spent $1600.00 in componentry to validate my "Simple EFI" idea! I will be doing more tests this winter and will be track testing in the spring. We are workind on the miimum battery requirements and packaging.

I used 2.5 Bar of pressure and will be testing more. I chose a disk valve engine for the symmetrical inlet timing. I used a valve the opened at 137 degrees BTDC and closed at 87 degrees ATDC. I started firing the injector 10 degrees earlier on the opening and stopped the injector 10 degrees after the valve closed.

Upon engine disassembly it was noted that the lubrication seemed to be better dispersed thru-out the engine (only an observation). The engine would start at less than 800 rpm of crank speed and would instantly accept full throttle load from 1200 rpm and up!

The only hurdle I see to over come is the packaging.

I am confident that my way of giving the ECU the MAP rather than having the ECU calculate the map is why I was successful. We have tuned by EGT for years and continue to see the relevance when using EFI in correlation to EGT. The increase power came by better fuel atomization. It stands to reason due to the limited time "Tuning" the system that even more power gains are to be realized with more work and data collection/analysis.

I am posting this information so more people will try this simple method and post their results here. I hope you all find the success that I did.

Attachment 307073

Larrys post has a few pictures of the BRC fuel injected BRC throttle bodies. More of BRC can be seen here:- http://brceng.com/brc-motorsports/

Video clip of a Inlet Port injected 15,000rpm 2T in action on the dyno.

Here are BRC EFI 125 engine videos




And photos of power curve and inlet

Attachment 306947Attachment 306948

[TZ350]

Attachment 307219Attachment 307220Attachment 307221

Well tonight's effort was a total bust, the two injectors send out such a cloud that it wets out on the bellmouth and dribbles down into the plenum which totally negates the reason for having injectors in the first place. Ie to stop fuel pooling in the plenum.

I can see the advantage of having the injectors behind the throttle slide like they have on the BRC engine. Gave up for the night after the EFI filled the crankcase with raw fuel.

Neels sent me some very informative links.

http://www.sandia.gov/ecn/gasolineSprayCombustion.php

http://www.cmt.upv.es/ECN.aspx

Neels also suggested I take a closer look at what happens at an injector, things like the "liquid length" and atomization and finally evaporation. Also the effect of impinging on a wall at what stage of the plume development.

[TZ350]

Ok so I have starting to work it out.

Attachment 307244

It was a bit hard but finally ... Success .....

I have been struggling with detto and running out of injection time trying to squirt in enough fuel to stop it.

In the end, the issue was all about the piston, which was (only just) tapping the head, not a big problem and I was to lazy to fix it, well tonight I did and the deto has disappeared.

Attachment 307242

I shifted the injectors back to the transfer ports and now with a bit of decent squish clearance the Beast rev's to 12,500rpm plus with injection time to spare.

Attachment 307245

So transfer port injection is a realistic option.

Initially I thought 9,000rpm was going to be the limit for transfer port injection but the Beast is now running to well past 12,000 rpm with the original transfer port injection setup.

Attachment 307243

The injectors swap over at about 7k rpm and the two main injectors still have some injection time left at 12,800 rpm and so it looks like it could go to 13 easy enough.

Ok so now that it works, its time to tune it properly and see if we can better the old carb setup.

[TZ350]

Attachment 307334

Alpha-N maps need to be smooth without any peaks or severe troughs between cell steps.

Ecotrons has a function where you can export a map to an Excel spread sheet and use the charting function to help smooth the map data.

Attachment 307335 Attachment 307336

Raw data and the chart showing how rough the data is and the engine ran just as roughly.

Attachment 307337 Attachment 307333

Smoothed data and chart.

No Idea if I have done this right, will get to find out tomorrow, hopefully ....

[TZ350]

Ok, I have found the section in the Ecotrons manual where it talks about tuning for the throttle blip.

Attachment 307775

By default it does not work above 3,000rpm, but I can set it higher to suit my engine.

Attachment 307776

From a quick read, the amount of enriching is tied to the predicted load increase as the throttle is opened. I guess its like a smart accelerator pump.

Attachment 307777

You can determine the "Load" from the recorded data.

Attachment 307778

And adjust the map, it looks like a bit of trial and error is required to get it right.

Attachment 307783

There are other adjustments in the advanced calibration file for tuning for the rate of change in the throttle opening (TPS).

All I need to do now is learn how to use it.

[FastFred]

Posted TeeZee's work over here to keep all the EFI stuff in one place for future reference. You never know, but a EFI Turbo 2T with CVT transmission may be a future possibility.

I think I have shot myself in the foot again.

After the poor showing at Taumarunui where the bike would not come back on the throttle I thought I had better run it up on the dyno with the Ecotrons Procal tuning program displaying the Gauge monitoring screen in the hope of seeing what was going on.

The bike would start and trickle out onto the track easily enough and it would fly like a cut cat when it was shown a bit of stick. But it had two real bad faults, at about 8,000 rpm it would jump around like a demented kangaroo and when it was shut off at high rpm it would not come back on the throttle until the rpm had dropped under 7,000 rpm or so.

I thought it may be to rich/lean at lower throttle settings on over run at high rpm or it needed some adjustment to the throttle blip virtual fuel pump. But no amount of Map fiddling improved things.

Sorry about the jerky video but that is the bike shaking me around as I was recording the gauges. Its not dangerous to run a bike up full tit on the dyno by yourself with one hand while trying to record video with the other - yeer right its not dangerous.

Top left gauge is rpm and it tops out close to 13,000. Top right is the TPS and the two gages on the bottom right are for the injectors. Injector 1 to the left, Injector 2 to the right.



You can see injector 1 increasing in pulse width until it switches over to injector 2 at about 8,000 rpm, just where it starts to jump about. Then Injector two stays at 1.7ms right up to 13,000 ish rpm.

Close the throttle and injector 2 stays at 1.7ms until the rpm drops back below 7,000rpm and the system switches back to the smaller injector 1 at which point the engine will respond to the throttle again.

On over run above the changeover point the engine won't respond to small and medium throttle openings but at higher rpm it will jump back into life when given full throttle.

Previously I had been wanting to get as much fuel in as possible in the shortest amount of time and I had made injector 2 as large as possible and injector 1 was much smaller and only for starting and off pipe running below 8,000 rpm. The smaller the injector the more adjustable it is with the fuel map.

Both injectors have a minimum open time of 1.7ms and what I think is happening is that the big injector is too big and even at its minimum open time it drowns the motor at anything less than near full throttle.

And the jerking at 8,000 rpm is the EFI being confused about whether to use the injector that is to small or the injector that is to big.

I think Injector 2 needs to be smaller so it gets held open over a greater range of time from say 1.7ms at small throttle openings and high rpm to 3.5ms for full throttle at high rpm.

At the moment the EFI works well with injector 1 but it has no adjustment with injector 2, its all or nothing, actually injector two is virtually full on all the time above 8,000 rpm because it can't be run any slower than 1.7ms it needs more adjustment and we can only get that by going to a smaller injector because a smaller injector would need to be held open for longer than the minimum 1.7ms.

To get the greatest range of adjustment out of a fuel injector you need one that is only just big enough to do the job. I think I have been running one that is way too big for the job and even on minimum open time it is drowning the motor on overrun.

Instead of thinking big injector to get loads in quickly I think to get best throttle response I need to think smallest injector possible that is only just big enough to do the job at max fuel demand (max torque).

Tomorrow I will swap out the big injector 2 for a smaller one and see how that goes, here is hoping ....

Attachment 308248

Ok after months in the wilderness I finally figured it out. And I was right about needing smaller injectors.

So it looks like, to maximize tune-ability you need to minimize the injector size......... in hindsight its so obvious really ....



Now that I have smaller injectors fitted, on the bottom right gauge you can see the number 2 injection pulse width increasing and decreasing and it is coming back onto the throttle much better now that the EMS has some pulse width range to play with.

Not perfect yet but very very promising.

[TZ350]

Further Progress on the EFI thing ......

Attachment 308248

Ok after months in the wilderness I finally figured it out. I was right about needing smaller injectors.

So it looks like, to maximize tune-ability you need to minimize the injector size......... in hindsight its so obvious really ....



Now that I have smaller injectors fitted, on the bottom right gauge you can see the number 2 injection pulse width increasing and decreasing and it is coming back onto the throttle much better now that the EMS has some pulse width range to play with.

Not perfect yet but very very promising.

Attachment 308315

Making progress with mapping the fuel injection.

Did a series of runs at different throttle openings 100-90-80-70% etc and it fell apart at 40%.

I will have to sit down now and look at the recorded run data to see why, it may just be to rich or something else, like the injectors are still to big or not crossing over nicely at 8-9,000 rpm.

Injectors turned up from Ecotrons today, four days from date of order and two of them were weekend days, pretty good service in my books.

Attachment 308623

I fitted a smaller injector and did a bunch of runs at different throttle settings. Interesting that the 60, 50 and 40% runs carry on out to close to 13,000 rpm.

Attachment 308625

Blue line is the TPS. 100-90-80-70-60-50-40% throttle settings. It is certainly throttling and coming back onto the power much better. I will have to analyse the data to see if I can use an even smaller injector.

Attachment 308624

Just by changing the central injector (and the injector size in the EFI software) I got the Blue line, I am not sure what that means as by rights, it was the same Alpha-N map so I was expecting the curves to be the same.....

The EFI lesson I learnt last month was, that to get the greatest range of tune ability I needed to use the smallest injectors possible that will still do the job. I know, pretty obvious, but there you go.

Attachment 308855Attachment 308856

I read the Ecotrons EFI manual and saw that the map must have as many even steps as possible and I thought that meant dividing the rpm range up as evenly as possible, seemed logical, but wrong again.

The bike bucked around swapping between the staged injectors as the EFI struggled to jump from one cell to another on the steeper parts of the fueling curve.

I guess what they really meant was that the changes between cells need to be as even as possible.

So I don't need even spacing between the rpm break points and can have big or small gaps between them so long as there are no big steps between adjacent cells.

That means I can straight line it between say idle and where the fuel demand just starts picking up around 7,000 rpm. And once again use a straight line after peak torque where the fuel demand is relatively steady again.

The straight line does not have to be horizontal, it can tip up or down, its just a line between two points on the map that may be several thousand rpm apart but covers an area of relatively similar fuel demand.

By straight lining where I can, I now have spare rpm break points to use to smooth out the map where the fuel demand is rapidly increasing with increasing torque.

Attachment 308853Attachment 308854

From left to right on the model, the first cell covers 4,500 rpm the next 1,500 rpm and the next only 250 rpm but the steps between the cells are relatively the same, ie a smoother map. Anyway I hope this is what they meant.

Attachment 308859

I can now throttle on/off pretty well and do a series of part throttle runs, the last one is at 30% TPS, it looks a bit lean.

Attachment 308857

Its not perfect but is running a lot better, so for what its worth here is the current Alpha-N map.

Yep, just like a large house party with interesting people.

Attachment 308890

The EFI is going better than ever but the evening ended in a woopsie .....

Attachment 308889

I was able to do several really good all gear runs with the bike coming back onto the throttle very nicely.

But my dreams of being the first persion to run an EFI 2T in a real F4 race on Sunday vanished when I felt the familiar overrun death shudder,

Attachment 308891

Getting pretty hot, interesting stain at the top of the combustion chamber where it looks like the transfer streams sweep up into the head.

Attachment 308888

Very dry in the bore and scratches that look like evidence of the ring ends butting up from over heating and the ring scraping the bore clean. Know more tomorrow when I get the cylinder off. It will be interesting to see how much oil there is in the crank case.

Attachment 308969Attachment 308970

Bit of quick work with a file and a light hone and everything is all good, even re used the piston ring, 2T's are so easy to work on

Attachment 308968

Dyno runs from from 100 to 20%, looks OK so hopefully back on for Sunday.

Not sure about the ring gap now, looked good when I took it apart, I think you are probably right about the lean seize as it was definitely getting no fuel at closed throttle.
There is a software switch in Ecotrons where you can turn the fuel off on over run..... and I had to try it just to see what it did, as you do.

You were on the money, I have been dialing in more fuel, heaps more fuel in the area of the Map that if it was a carb it would be the pilot and slide plus the very first bit of the needle.

Comes back on the throttle much better now, hopefully get to ride it tomorrow.

No, because it ran very well every where with 50% plus TPS. It was easy to get the EFI running in the "main jet" area. But tuning the lower parts of the Map is taking a bit of patience.

It would rev out real hard, shut the throttle and it would not light up again until the revs had dropped below 8 or the throttle was opened past 50%.

I had no idea what a Map should look like or if it was rich or lean until I put the O2 sensor back on it.

Been taking lots of dyno runs at part throttle and comparing them as I make changes to the Map.

Carburetors are great because of their analog ability to change the fuel delivery with changes in air flow at the same throttle setting.

EFI, well EFI is not forgiving at all.

Attachment 309236 16 Alpha-N map lines with most of them concentrated in the upper power area of the graph.

Back to the EFI thing. The Ecotrons Alpha-N map has 16 rows to work with and I had concentrated them in the area where the power is, as you do. Well that turns out to be a mistake because there is not much difference in fuel demand per cycle between 100% throttle and 90 or 80 or even 70 at max power and virtual no difference at all above 40% in the 3 to 6000 rpm range.

The big jumps were between the lower throttle settings where there was not much excitement happening, well the mistake is that the CPU has a hard time bridging the big gaps below 40% especially when it is also trying to swap between low and high injectors at the same time.

Attachment 309235 16 Alpha-N map lines more evenly spread so as to not have any big jumps between them.

Under 35% throttle is pretty unexciting power wise but on the track its a big deal as far as on track drive-ability is concerned. So for the next attempt I am going to use more Map lines in the lower area where things are changing rapidly with throttle position and less in the upper area where things are not changing so much, the power at 80% throttle is not very much different to 100%.

As it turns out, it was a mistake to concentrate my map in the power area, but I guess I will forgive myself.....

[bigbadbob]

Hi guys and thanks for the info on ecotrons.
I'm playing around with an ecotrons 250 ninja ecu on my citroen 2cv engine trike and found a lot of usefull info here.
My setup is -
2 cyl 602cc boxer engine, 1 bmw 43mm throttle body with 1 injector. intake manifold splits from the throttle body to each cylinder.
Trigger is from a zephyr 550, four pulses per rev, one long, three short, like the ninja 250 but going clockwise.
As someone mentioned, when bench testing, the injectors appear to fire together in sync. so as long as the ecu will handle a map pulse every revolution then it "should" work. I might have to tell the software it's a single cylinder 301cc 2 stroke.
Great playing with this stuff.

Keep it sunny side up. :-)
Bob in Scotland.

[TZ350]

Hi Bob, glad to hear about your project, can you post some photos? they would be interesting to look at. PS you may need to have made a few posts before you can post pictures. Anyway I would love to hear how your project progresses.

[bigbadbob]

Thanks for your interest TZ350.
I'll see if i can post some pics from photobucket........





I had the setup running on the bench last night with the trigger wheel mounted in the lathe and scoped the outputs, only firing one injector and only once per rev, i need it to fire twice per rev but i didnt have any vacuum on the map sensor so that might sort it.
I'm turning up a flange to mount the trigger wheel on the tapered crankshaft, pics will explain it all when i get them up.

[bigbadbob]

Woohoo... that worked, so here's the bmw f650 throttle body that's been turned down to fit in a 955i inlet rubber and mounted on an insulated plate.




and here's the end of the crankshaft, there's a fan that mounts on the tapered end but there's planty of room for a trigger wheel behind the fan.




here's the aircraft aluminium flange i turned up,

[speedpro]

So, flat twin, 180 degree crank, ignition triggers on the camshaft so assume the cylinders fire alternate revolutions or 360 degrees apart.

If you are using only one injector you will need to fire it every revolution as you have said. I'm assuming from what you have said that you are making your own trigger disc to go on the end of the crank.

If you make a trigger wheel with 6 short teeth and 2 long teeth in a symmetrical pattern - 3,1,3,1, the ECU will think the crank has done 2 revolutions when in fact it has only done one. If you have a MAP fluctuation "every" revolution instead of the Kawasaki's one, the ECU should fire injector one on the 2nd revolution as well. It should be fine to leave injector 2 disconnected but maybe a load wouldn't hurt.

The Ecotrons system uses the MAP to determine which cylinder is firing, instead of using a camshaft mounted "home" trigger.

Since you are doing fabrication I was wondering why you didn't use the Kawasaki/Ecotrons throttle body and just make a trigger wheel to match the required timing. The throttle body flows enough for the engine especially with the volume of the manifold acting as a plenum.