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K Series Starting Issue


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Andrew iiuc this issue arises when the engine is cold but not when warm? If that's right can it be an ecu mapping question? Even if not, could it be?

I googled:

emerald k6 iacv settings

wondering if this IACV thing can be influenced by the ECU mapping which usually is in charge of most things.

and found this:

Idle Air Control Valve & Cold Start Calibration.

To suit engines using TPS as primary load reference.

http://www.emeraldm3d.com/Emerald/IACV/TPMS/crib_sheet.pdf

page 7

There are two aspects to running a cold engine, initial starting and then the warm up period. For example; the engine may fire straight away but stall after a few seconds of running.

page 8

If the engine fires and then cuts after a few engine turns, you can increase the number of turns that this enrichment is applied for, and/or change the % of extra fuel injected

Whether Emerald or any other ECU I imagine. Any idea how to program a mems? ;-)

Anthony

 

#5

#20

https://www.emeraldm3d.com/software-manuals

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Hi Anthony,

There are a whole load of different issues being mixed up here.

The cause and effect of a voltage drop depend on where in the circuit it occurs.

If the wiring back to the battery is poor, the voltage measured at the starter or solenoid will be lower than the battery voltage due to the voltage dropped through the resistance of the wiring and connections. That's one kind of "voltage drop". The voltage at the battery itself won't be affected (the voltage at the battery will still go down under load as it would with good cabling due to internal resistance inside the battery, but no more so and in fact probably less so with like cabling as less current will be drawn).

In this case, whether other circuits are affected is a bit if complicated question. Anything wired directly off the battery will not be affected as the voltage drop isn't seen at the battery. However in cars with an FIA switch most of the circuits are usually taken off the starter motor main terminal to out them after the switch. In this case those other circuits will be affected by voltage drops caused by the main motor current draw, but not by issues with the solenoid wiring. In the car we out in a distribution post between the FIA switch and starter main terminal; so it would depend on where the resistance was, upstream or downstream of that list, as to whether other circuits would be affected.

However, the voltage drops we are talking about with the Brise starter are of a completely different nature. In this case there is no problem wit the wiring ... in fact the better the wiring, the worse the problem will be. In this case what is happening is that the starter motor is, for a few milliseconds when first engaged, drawing a very large current - sufficient that the voltage drop across the internal resistance of the battery means that the voltage measured directly across the battery terminals falls to a low level. As low as 5V for a very short time. You need on oscilloscope to see it, not a multimeter, as the voltage only falls that low for milliseconds 

In this case, all other circuits will be affected as everything feeds off the battery, either directly or indirectly.

In the first case, the voltage at the starter would be low but the voltage at the battery would be normal. In the second case, the voltage everywhere would be low.

The starting issues are caused by the transiently low voltage being sensed by the ECU, which reacts as though you had turned off the ignition key. It then recycles the IACV ready for the next start. On a standard K, after switching off the ignition, you can hear an electronic whirring and clicking noise for a few seconds. This is the IACV recycling and is what is triggered by the transient low voltage.

The IACV is a stepped motor. It's not a servo, so the ECU doesn't gety feedback as to its current position. It relies on just telling it to increase or decrease by a number of steps. That all works fine so long as it knows where it is to start with. The only way it can do this is to send it enough "close" instructions to guarantee that it is fully closed, then it knows where it is. That's what you hear it doing, a long string of "close" pluses followed a number of "open" pulses defined by the map which places the IACV in the correct position for starting.

While the ECU is busy recycling the IACV, it obviously can't use it to manage the idle. It will be too far closed to maintain the correct idle speed for most of the procedure, therefore the engine dies immediately after starting ubkess you give it some throttle (the IACV is just a little throttle under ECU control in parallel with the main throttle, and being small only really has any effect when the main throttle is almost closed).

Cars with throttle bodies would not normally have an idle control valve, no. So your car doesn't have one. Everything else about the MEMS3 ECU recovers so quickly from a dropout that you wouldn't notice a problem. By the time you release the key from the start position it would have recovered and would run normally. It's only the IACV recycle that takes a significant amount if time. So without an IACV I doubt you would notice any running issue even if the ECU was getting upset by a transient voltage dropout on starting.

In your case you have an Emerald ECU. I'm not sure whether they contain any filtering on the ignition sense inputs that would avoid them responding to a transient dropout or not, but they mostly get used on cars with throttle bodies so as described above, if they did suffer from the same issue it would probably go unnoticed.

And yes, similar problems could be caused by mapping issues, but that's not the issue here. Startup and warmup enrichment problems would not be resolved by swapping the starter motor. The MEMS ECUs have quite sophisticated startup and warmup corrections which don't tend to need much tinkering with. The Emerald does have various options to correct the startup and warmup enrichment etc. as you have found, but they're just not the issue here.

There is some correlation with engine temperature, and yes cold engines do seem to suffer from the problem more than warm engines, but I think there are two contributions to that:

Firstly, the resistance of copper increases with increasing temperature. A hot engine often means a warm starter motor (you've already alluded to the issues caused by exhaust heat in the starter). This means that when starting a bit engine, the starter will drawn less current from the battery. Intuitively you might expect this to lead to worse starting performance; it does, but a warm engine is easier to start anyway and in this case reducing the current draw will reduce the voltage drop at the battery and therefore reduce the chances of the IACV recycle being triggered, so you will see the issue less on a bit engine.

Secondly a hot engine will turn over more easily, meaning that the starter motor will start turning more quickly. The transient inrush current will therefore not persist for so long and the transient voltage drop will be shorter.

There are two things which limit the current in the starter motor. There is the resistance of the wire coils; this is largely a DC effect and just determines the current through Ohm's law - current is voltage divider by the resistance. But there is also the inductance of the coils, which is an effect connected with the energy stored in the magnetic field generated. This is an AC effect and resists changes in the current in the coils. So when first energising the coils the inductance effect dominates, resisting the change in current and forcing the current to ramp up with time, until eventually the current is sufficient for the resistance to start to dominate, limiting the ultimate peak current. When the motor is turning rapidly, the commutator and brushes are constantly switching different coils on and off rapidly, so the inductive effects are more important as the coils aren't energised long enough to reach the resistive limits. When the motor is first engaged and is only turning very slowly, the coil current has time to ramp up a lot higher.

And yes, you can get nasty voltage spikes if you turn the engine off using the master switch, but again theses are quite unrelated.

In this case, the voltage pulses produced by the alternator windings are loaded down by the battery; if you disconnect the battery with the alternator spinning it has no load and will produce damaging high voltage pulses.

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guess what? I have made my usual mistake concerning the most obvious. I thought this was all about the alternator and (finally) from your above I see it's the starter. Though I have a Brise starter too. But no IACV.

Q: How long is one turn of the crank when starting?

Q: How long is the transient voltage drop?

How about making the ECU deaf for that time? Just to the voltage drop.

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Is this:

The IACV is a stepped motor. It's not a servo, so the ECU doesn't get feedback as to its current position. It relies on just telling it to increase or decrease by a number of steps. That all works fine so long as it knows where it is to start with.

 

about this (page 14 K6 manual):

If using a 4 wire stepper motor then you can also specify whether the Stepper motor should re-sync it’s home position at key-on, key-off or not at all. The re-sync routine is useful not only from the synchronisation point of view but also as it helps to keep the valve’s working surfaces clean and free of deposits.

?

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Yes "this" is about "that" *smile*

As for your other questions, it depends on the cranking speed, which will start low and increase.

"Making the ECU Deaf" is not quite as easy at it sounds. The "Ingition Sense Input" is actually more of an "Ignition Switched Power Supply" in that it draws significant current and supplies internal circuitry rather than being a high-impedance sense input.

So making the ECU "not notice" the voltage drop there is a bit like making a light bulb "not notice" that you'd switched light off!

It could be done but it would require some really hefty filter capacitors and associated circuitry and at the end of the day it's just bodging around a problem that shouldn't be there. With these starters, other electronics have also shown strange symptoms in response to the supply drop-out. The most annoying of these was one car where every time you turned the key to crank it, the immobiliser re-armed itself!

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this looks relevant:

Check that the solenoid energising wire is of adequate size for the solenoid amps draw required, if too small, an excessive volt drop will occur.

I guess "energising wire" is the thick one to the solenoid.. nope. Which is it?. (My thin wire was once down to 6 volts due to years of cooking)

and seems to assume the thick red wire is direct to the battery.

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guess what, Carl Emerald says the same as you:

#Brise

 

Hi Anthony,

 

Ah ok, I think I understand now.

 

When connected to the Rover MEMS wiring the K6 ECU has x2 supplies, one from the main relay and one from the ignition switch.

 

The K6 key-off condition is triggered when the ignition switch input is <5v for more than 150mS.

 

If the K6 is reset because there is a significant system supply dip below 5v then there is an issue with the wiring/battery/etc.

 

If the engine has throttle bodies (without an IACV) the ECU reset due to a short dip in the battery voltage is unlikely to be noticed.  The ECU will be running again within a few milliseconds of the input voltage recovering above 5v.

If the ECU is controlling an IACV then a resync will be triggered.  This will most likely cause a delay to the engine start and/or a low idle speed that recovers as the idle valve moves to the normal run position.

 

If low voltage dip (<5 volts) is seen on the battery terminal then it indicates poor battery health or insufficient power capacity.

If battery voltage dip is ok but the system voltage drops low enough to reset the ECU then I would investigate how the vehicle supply & starter motor supply are connected.

 

Best regards,

Karl

My thanks to Karl.

how the vehicle supply & starter motor supply are connected.

 

me: SO In this thread's case, the Brise.

How frustrating. I need another mountain.

 

 

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That's interesting. Karl's description of the Emerald K6's behaviour is pretty much an exact description of what I worked out was happening with MEMS3. With one difference ...

The Emerald sounds like it has rather better immunity to this problem. The transient dropouts that I saw on my oscilloscope were down to 5.2V at worst and had largely recovered within 50-100ms. They would not meet the requirement for <5V for more than 150ms. MEMS3 must be rather more sensitive.

So hopefully those running an Emerald (like you, Anthony) should be rather less likely to see this problem.

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Thanks Andrew, that's a relief in that I haven't totally wasted my time down this rabbit hole, fun though it has been.

What you describe there is exactly what I meant about making the ECU "deaf" (as in don't listen so frequently). Only a "workaround" of course. As ever it is in the details we find ... not sure what the word is, "information sufficient to satiate the/my curiosity (that cat)". That is, aside form not identifying exactly why the starter behaves as it does. Notable though that the same behaviour has been seen with the WOSP earlier in this thread, which was one of the things that attracted my attention. 

Given your work on the MEMS could you not change this parameter? Or is that a work of Hercules? I need to read/find one of your write ups about that.. 

edit: it's tempting to wonder if the two Emerald parameters of <5v and longer than 150ms are coincidental whether at the Emerald end or the Brise end, given both are aimed at motorsport. I guess I'll never know. Given Karl clearly recognises and uses such parameters based on knowing how such issues can arise maybe the Emerald end.

edit2: 

sales@emeraldm3d.co.uk

;-)

Anthony

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Ah OK, that will only be Table 108 in that very specific version of the VVC firmware, the table numbers vary from firmware to another. And no not very relevant. That just gives the position of the IACV under normal running conditions, where it's most used to manage manifold vacuum, engine braking and throttle response. I don't think it's even used during starting and idling, there are separate controls for starting and the long idle stability table controls the IACV during idle. I certainly has nothing to do with voltage dropout detection. If there's anything in the map to control it, it will most likely be in scalar data rather than tables.

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Yes, as opposed to a table with lots of values. Single numeric constants. Except some of the "scalar" data is actually addressed by the firmware code as arrays ... which are not exactly scalar. And they're quite hard to attribute any meaning to without actually looking through the source or disassembly code, they're just meaningless numbers otherwise. You don't even know which ones are pairs of 1-byte numbers, which ones are 2-byte numbers and which ones are half of a 4-byte number, never mind which are arranged as arrays. A long list of raw numbers is all you get.

The next release of my mapper will decode all of this by reverse engineering the binary code, as part of the next "big thing" I'm working on ...

To show you what I mean, here's the scalar block from my ECU, let me know if you can see anything useful in there! I can send you the corresponding disassembled code by BM if you REALLY want to stare at it *smile* (knowing you ... you probably will!)

Anything that ends in 32 is a round number temperature in °C, expressed in tenths of a °K.

And the two 2-byte numbers 248, 54272 are actually the 4-byte number 16,307,200, which is the CPU clock speed! The way the compiler worked, pretty all of the numeric constants used in calculations end up in the scalar block in the map file rather than inline in the code, even if they're not things that could ever be usefully changed as part of the map (e.g. if you change the clock speed, you won't actually make the ECU go faster or slower, the speed is set by a crystal - all you'll do is mess up all of the Baud rate calculations).

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