A Mass Air Flow (MAF)-Based System for Monitoring, Controlling and Optimizing Car Engine Operation, Using FPGAs and VHDL

Abstract: A mass air flow (MAF) system, based on MD0550 sensor, FPGAs and VHDL, is presented here. The system is capable of providing a series of controls and subsequently activate respective alarm systems, related to car engine operation optimization. It can simultaneously monitor four basic air flow-related parameters. The first is air flow values lowering below lower critical set value, leading to respective insufficient fuel supply. Both blue LED and half left of board LEDs light up and buzzer also sounds to indicate the above fact with simultaneous white LED lighting, which represents additional fuel supply system activation. Second operation parameter checks if air flow values are within set limits and if this holds true, green LED lights up. Third basic operation parameter is related to air flow values becoming higher than upper set values, leading to red LED lighting. Finally, fourth basic operation parameter is checking whether air flow values remain above upper set value for a specific time period, leading to subsequent activation of decrease fuel supply system, represented with lighting yellow LED, while half right of board LEDs also light up. MD0550 air flow sensor used here and its output analog voltage values act as input to FPGA’s ADC unit and converted values are pre-sented to seven-segment displays. The system uses DE10-Lite FPGA board and taking into account that specific time periods, as well as upper and lower air flow limits can be set to a variety of values, gives our system the ability of im-plementation in a wide range of applications such as car engine operation, human breath detection, room occupancy detection, HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning) system monitoring and weather stations. Our system is cheap to manufacture and can be also combined with IoT systems, allowing its use to logistics applications.

Keywords: MD0550 air flow sensor, air flow monitoring, FPGA, VHDL, Buzzer, LEDs.