Basic tuning 101

Fueling

In all of EFI fuel tuning, the goal is to make an educated guess as to the amount of fresh air going into the motor and to
inject a corresponding amount of fuel that will use up all of the oxygen before the exhaust valve opens. It sounds simple;
but the devil is in the details. The guess can be based on the angle of the throttle blade and the engine speed, known as
Alpha-N tuning; the density of the air in the intake and engine speed, known as Speed Density; or direct measurement. The
last, and a fairly popular method often used by the factories, is Mass Air Flow (MAF). This method attempts to directly
measure the airflow going into the motor using modern electronics.

As it turns out, most motors can “run” reasonably well under a fairly wide range of fuel compared to the air going into the
motor. This balance of air to fuel is most commonly referred to as the Air Fuel Ratio (AFR) and is calculated as parts air
per parts fuel by mass. Most engines normally run with AFRs from about 15.5 parts air to one part fuel at very low engine
loads to about 12.0 to one on a turbocharged engine under boost. High numbered AFRs are generally referred to as lean
and small numbers are rich.

Fuel injectors are the devices that meter the amount of fuel that we spray into the motor. They are usually rated in lbs/hour
or cc/min. These ratings are determined by opening them fully and simply measuring the amount of fuel that sprays
through at 43.5 PSI fuel pressure for some amount of time. However, we never really use injectors this way. In reality, we
pulse the injector once per engine cycle for just the right amount of time in order to release the amount of fuel to match the
calculated amount of air making it into the motor.

A few definitions before we get started:

MAP: Manifold Air Pressure or Manifold Absolute Pressure, depending who you ask. A MAP of 0 implies no air
at all in the intake. This never really happens in the tuning world. The smallest value for MAP typically seen is
about 15 KPA in a huge downshift. At full throttle, on a naturally aspirated motor, we will see real close to 100
KPA at wide open throttle. This assumes we are near sea level. If you have a turbo charger or blower, the MAP
can approach 200 or even 300 KPA in race motors.

TPS or TP: Throttle Position Sensor or Throttle Position. This is generally the angle of the throttle blades. This
usually ranges from about 10 degrees at idle to 90 degrees at WOT. It is also common to display the angle as a
percentage from 0 (closed throttle) to 100 (fully open throttle). It simply depends on the system you are tuning
with.

WOT: Wide Open Throttle. No explanation needed.

IAT: Intake Air Temperature. Used in the calculation to figure out the density of air in the intake. Cold air is
more dense.

CLT: Coolant Temperature or Water Temperature. Used to determine if the motor is up to operating temperature.
Cold motors usually need a little more fuel added to account for fuel that doesn’t vaporize sufficiently or
condenses on cold engine parts and is unavailable for combustion.

Look-Up Table: This is a programming thing. Some things in EFI programming are difficult to model with a
formula. It is sometimes easier to simply have a table that is defined by an X and Y value. Something like X =
RPM and Y = MAP and the field of the table has some value that you want to use in a calculation.

VE: Volumetric efficiency. The relative pumping efficiency of the engine. A VE of 100 means that every time a
one liter engine cycles, exactly one liter of fresh air is drawn in. A VE of 50 indicates that only one half liter is
drawn in. In the real world this number runs from about 40 at idle to about 105 at the torque peak of the motor.

Injector Size Constant: This is a number that the EFI uses to match the engine size to the Injector Size. It is
defined as how long the injector has to be held open to deliver the quantity of fuel required for a specific AFR
given an engine’s displacement. This number goes by lots of different names.

Target AFR: This is the AFR that the motor will be most happy given all of the other conditions above. It is
almost always held in a look-up table.
 Closed Loop Fueling: The ECU monitors the O2 sensors and when it is determined that the Target AFR different
from the actual AFR, a correction is applied to the VE to bring the two values closer. If a clear pattern develops,
the average correction can be applied to a Long Term Fuel Trim table.

Open Loop Fueling: No corrections are made by the ECU based on what is learned by the O2 sensors.

The Basic Fueling Equation

This is the equation that most all EFI motors use to calculate how long to open the injectors, known as Pulse Width. This
assumes we are running Speed Density EFI.

The Basic Fueling Equation

This is the equation that most all EFI motors use to calculate how long to open the injectors, known as Pulse Width. This
assumes we are running Speed Density EFI.

Pulse Width at the Injector =

(Injector Size Constant)

*
MAP / 100
*
(VE Lookup RPM, MAP) / 100 * (14.7 / (Target AFR Lookup RPM,MAP))
*

(IAT Temp Correction) * (CLT Warm-up Correction)

Oxygen Sensors

There are two basic styles of wideband sensors that are available to most tuners. Narrowband and Wideband.

Narrowbands are very fast and very accurate at just one AFR, 14.7 Anywhere else in the 11 to 16 or so range, they are
sketchy at best. All you really know is if the voltage is higher then .45 volts the mixture is Richer than 14.7 AFR. Lower
voltage indicates Leaner than 14.7 AFR.

Widebands are capable of reading fairly accurately from about 11 AFR to about 19 AFR. Some brands are more accurate
than others. Most of them are fairly consistent. They tend to be more accurate near 14.7 AFR. None of them like really
high temperatures and pressures like are common between the motor and a turbo.

Wideband O2 sensors are generally more accurate on the rich side of 14.7 AFR, most quickly get very inaccurate on the
lean side.

Also an explanation of precision vs accuracy is warranted. Many people believe their wideband is accurate to .1 or .01 or
even 0.001 simply because that is the precision displayed. Actually I have even seen some manufacturers claim accurate to
that degree confusing accuracy with precision.

Bringing this all back around to real world tuning.

The goal on the fuel side of things is to have the actual AFR as measured at the O2 sensor to be as close as possible to the
AFR as set up in the Target AFR table. We can do this with widebands or narrowbands. Most tuning I have done with
narrowbands is typically done on factory systems that have been hacked with some sort of tuning package. Most of these
stock derived systems have short term fuel trims and long term fuel trims. Typically, tuning software provides data logs to
analyze these trims to develop new fueling maps.

Here is a screen shot of a typical Fuel Aim or Target AFR table

In this table, the EFI code would determine the RPM based on the Crank Position Sensor and the MAP base of the
Manifold Pressure gauge and the look up the corresponding AFR. For example if the RPM was 5000 and the MAP was
100. The AFR Target look-up would be 13 AFR. (See the white box in the field)

The VE lookup would happen in a similar manner.

In this same example of a 5000 RPM and 100 KPA, the VE lookup would end up 107.9 (See the white box in the field)

The code will also retrieve readings from the Engine Coolant and Intake Air Temperature sensors and have everything
required to calculate the Pulse Width at the injector.

Another way to view this same data would be with a scatter plot. Using a 3 axis scatter plot allows you to see not only the
areas the engine is actually running in, but the color can show how rich or how close the results are.

The resulting graph from a few thousand samples may look something like this
On the plot on the left is the Target AFR and on the right is the AFR as sampled by the Wideband AFR in the exhaust
system. If the VE table were perfectly tuned, the two plots would look identical. In reality, they never are perfect.

We can also view this all happening in a log view.

In this trace, at the top is the RPM, MAP and TP or Throttle Position. The second trace has the Target AFR named (Fuel
Mixture Aim) and resulting AFR (named Sync50hz AFR in this trace). Notice how red trace follows the white trace. Also,
take note that in the forth trace, the MAPxRPM almost exactly follows the Duty Cycle. This is a very common trait on
most all motors.
MAPxRPM and Duty Cycle

MAP is the primary factor that effects the density of the air in the intake at any given time. If you double the air pressure
in the intake from 50 KPA to 100 KPA, the number of molecules in the intake will roughly double. As it turns out, RPM is
roughly the rate that the air is being processed through the motor, so if you double the RPM, you will double the air flow.
This all adds up to, if you create a calculated field named MAPxRPM, it will be a very good predictor of air flow.

Fuel Injector Duty Cycle and Fuel Flow

We now have the air flow part of AFR but we now need to get fuel flow. An injector flows some amount of fuel in volume
of fuel per time any time it is open. If you precisely control the amount of time it is open, you can get a very predictable
volume of fuel. Double that time and you should get double the amount of fuel. On a 4 stroke motor, it takes 720 degrees
of crank rotation to complete one full engine cycle. If the code calculates that the injector needs to spray 180 degrees of
this 720 degrees of rotation, the duty cycle is 180/720 or 25% Injector Duty Cycle. Notice that there is an absolute limit of
100% for Duty Cycle. There is only so much time for spraying the injector before the next engine cycle starts again. The
formula for one complete engine cycle can always be calculated with the simple formulas.

Duty Cycle = [Injector Pulse Width] * [RPM] / 1200

Or

Injector Pulse Width = 1200 * [Duty Cycle] / [RPM]

This uses the Pulse Width in milliseconds or thousandths of a second. Duty cycle is in percent of 720 degrees of engine
rotation. In reality, the injector needs a little time to open and a little time to close. The actual spraying time for an
injector is about 1 ms less than the actual time that the injector is energized. The actual time varies a little from injector
part number to his lost spray time is programmed into the ECU as the injector Dead Time or Injector Flow Table or some
other similar name.

Volumetric Efficiency

VE is one of the most misunderstood engine terms on the internet. I find it best to explain it as the last big “fudge factor”
used in the fueling equation to get the AFR to hit the Target AFR. The VE can either be in a MAP vs RPM table known as
Speed Density or a TPS vs RPM table known as Alpha-N. Speed density is the most common tuning method in the
replacement ECU world. In the Fuel-Adder world of EFI tuning, an Alpha-N based correction is still common. Speed
Density must be used when tuning turbo motors.

Here is a side by side comparison of a data log showing the AFR in the field. On the left is a Speed Density representation
based on MAP and on the right is the throttle based Alpha-N representation.
Zooming in on the data by changing the scales and you get…

Some motors can be tuned with either method. Other configurations favor one way of tuning. Generally, motors with
extreme ram tuning like Alpha-N tuning above about 15% throttle. You may find Speed Density tuning easier below this
15% throttle. Most motors with open plenum manifolds tune out just fine with Speed Density. High strung motors with
huge cams may be easier to tune Alpha-N. It all depends just how well MAPxRPM predicts airflow.

AFR Targets

An AFR of 14.7 is the perfect combination of fuel and air to chemically run out of fuel at exactly the same time you run out
of oxygen in the process of combustion in the cylinder. The EPA feels this is the best combination to minimize pollution.
This is the target AFR about 90% of the time on all modern EPA tuned motors. Unfortunately motors are far happier at
low power (Under about 75 KPA) targeting about 14 AFR. At 100 KPA, they prefer about 13 AFR. If fuel mileage is your
major concern, targeting about 14.9 AFR works great on most motors up to the power levels (KPA) that it takes to hold
highway speeds on level roads. Luckily, it is fairly easy to find that sweet spot in the powerband with a quick ride on the
highway with the data loggers running. Typically this power band works out to a very narrow RPM range and about 40 to
75 KPA.
Fine Tuning VE Tables with Narrowband O2 Sensors

Narrow band O2s are very accurate at finding 14.7 AFR. A motor running very close to this magic number will cause the
O2 sensors to constantly switch from about .1 volt when the AFR is leaner than 14.7 to about .9 volts when richer. .We can
use this behavior to our advantage. Here is a plot of a motor running in closed loop with narrow band sensors. On the left
we are plotting MAP vs RPM and in the field is O2 sensor voltage. You can see in the middle of the plot, the voltage has
no clear pattern. Around the perimeter, you can see clear red and blue patterns where the motor is lean ro rich compared to
14.7 AFR. On the right shows in blue where the motor is in open loop. Yellow indicates where the motor is in closed
loop.

In the next shot, We look at the fuel trims. This is the value that the ECU has stored in the Long Term Fuel trims. In this
log, the trims are called VE Mult Front and VE Mult Rear. Notice the scale of the color runs from .88 to 1.00 This implies
that in the darker blue areas, the code is pulling about 12% fuel. In the orange areas, the base fueling tables are real close
to correct as the multiplier is close to one. Keep in mind the scale of the colors as shown on the right. On the right plot,
we are looking at MAPxRPM or airflow along the bottom and Fuel Injector Duty Cycle on the vertical axis or Fuel Flow.
Notice how there are two distinct lines developing in that plot on the right. That is evidence of a major bust in an O2
controls logic. The white circles are matching points in the two plots.
If we zoom in on the right plot of MAPxRPM vs Duty Cycle and make the color to indicate O2 voltage, you can clearly a
pattern to the colors. Blue indicates that the code is adding fuel and waiting for the O2s to notice that the motor is actually
rich and waiting to switch back the other direction.

One way to use narrowbands is to set the entire AFR Target to 14.7 everywhere below 80 KPA. Then drive the motor and
later look at the data. In the screen shot below, the data on the upper right of both plots is clearly red. Red indicates rich
compared to the target AFR. I would pull about 3% fuel in the clearly red areas and add about 3% fuel in the clearly blue
areas and retest. Once you have the entire plot switching from blue to red, you are hitting close to your targets everywhere
by adjusting you VE table. It would now be time change your Target AFR table to the AFR you really want to run the
motor for smooth running.
Tuning for MPG and Power Delivery

The trick to get good fuel economy is having the target AFR close to 14.7 where you operate your motor, most of the time.
This area of operation is fairly easy to locate in MLV. If you plot RPM vs MAP and have the color assigned to Hits.
Colors, other than blue indicates lots of running time.

If we look at the same data in Histogram view and set the color to (Color Based on Hit Weight) you get this.
The cells displayed in dark green indicate where the motor spends lots of time. Notice that this motor is set to 14.7 Target
AFR in most of those dark green cells. As the MAP rolls out of this high usage area and get closer to 100 KPA, the Target
AFR fades to 13 -13.1 AFR. Most anywhere that the background color is white or yellow has almost no effect on fuel
economy and can be set for max power and smooth running.

Optimizing AFR for a Smooth Running Motor and Max Power

I like setting up a motor using a Wideband to help the motor hit the Target AFR. I prefer to set the Target AFR to 14 AFR
below about 60 KPA. Naturally aspirated motors make best power at close to 13 AFR at WOT (Wide Open Throttle).
Turbo motors like about 12 AFR at about 185 KPA. Generally, the AFR should continue to get richer as the boost climbs
but be careful trusting ant wideband at these power levels as widebands tend to be less reliable as the AFR gets away from
14.7 AFR. 11 AFR on all gauges is far enough from 14.7 that everything needs to be questioned. At these power levels, I
then to trust MAPxRPM vs Duty Cycle and the dyno, watching for drops in the torque. Detonation can be very difficult to
hear and spot without good knock detection hardware and software. Here is a plot of knock detection at fairly high boost
levels.
Acceleration Enrichment and Decel Enleanment

Any intake manifold that has a mixture of fuel droplets floating in air has some of that fuel collect on the walls of the
intake port. Very low pressures like when the motor is in a downshift makes this fuel that has collected on the walls to
evaporate very quickly. Once the throttles are quickly opened back up by the operator, the fuel will start to collect again on
the walls of the intake. This all happens in most modern EFI motors in tenths of a sec. When the throttle is closed quickly,
all this fuel will cause a huge spike of fuel making it into the combustion chamber and the injectors can also be shut off for
a split sec. Conversely, when you stab the throttle the injectors not only need to supply the normal amount of fuel required
by the motor to run at the correct AFR, they also need to rewet the intake walls. It is this adding and pulling fuel is what
this AE/DE thing is all about.

In the real world of EFI tuning, this is all done with experience from looking at fuel delivery logs and watching the motor
response. Wideband AFR systems are simply not good at extreme changes in air flow and are of very little help here.

This entire log in this screen shot is only about 3 sec. The motor is sitting at about 1800 RPM when the throttle is stabbed.
The motor starts accelerating about 1/10 if a sec later. In the third trace is the RPM / sec acceleration of the chrankshaft. It
peaks at about 17000 RPM/sec labeled RPMdot in green. You can see in the second trace, the AFR trace trying to catch on
the changing air flow. Remember that an O2 sensor is very sensitive to temperature and the exhaust temp is changing fast
at this point. Look at the two traces at the bottom. MAPxRPM and Duty Cycleare holding right together. The same thing
is true with the MAP vs Pulse Width. If anything, I would normally expect the fuel flow would have to jump up a little
more than it is in this trace. Normally I like to see the red lines in these two lower traces to jump up about 10% for about a
1/10 of a sec.

The way the code adds this AE fueling and how the GUI interface presents the AE adjustability varies a lot from one
tuning software to the next. Most all of them have some way. Keep in mind that you need about 50 samples per sec in the
data logs to see it happening at the fuel level. This stuff happens fast on high performance motors.

DE tuning is very seldom noticeable from the seat. Keep in mind that a backfire or popping in the exhaust during a down
shift is not DE tuning related.

A pop or RPM delay when stabbing the throttle is almost always AE related.
Big data logs are your friend

Here is what a half million or so records looks like when viewed in a scatter plot. This is a typical inline liter bike motor
logged for about 2 hours at 66hz. Patterns that you will never see on a dyno become very apparent with lots of data. This
motor happens to be running full time closed loop fueling thru the entire power band.

Fields to Log

Sensors
RPM,
MAP or Intake Manifold Absolute Air Pressure,
Throttle Position,
Target AFR,(or Target Lambda)
Intake Air Temperature,
Water Temperature,
MAF, (if installed)
Volumetric Efficiency,
Baro Pressure (If you are changing altitude)

ECU Calcs
Ignition Timing (From the Base Timing Table)
Acel Enrichment,
Decl Enleanment,
Duty Cycle and/or Pulse Width
Knock Detection (Noise)
Timing Retard (The Correction to Base Timing Table

Results
AFR, (Lambda)
Vehicle Speed,
Short Term Fuel Trims,
Long Term Fuel Trims

Scatter Plots
Scatter Plots are a way of viewing data that may be seemingly random. This plotting method is commonly used when
searching for patterns in data. The most basic use is to verify that an input, generates a predictable response from
something else or the output. For example, here is the data generated from plotting on the horizontal axis, the position of
the throttle pedal and on the vertical axis, or output, is the position at the actual throttle body. Notice that there are a few
random dots scattered around, but the vast majority of the dots are on a very predictable line. In this example, the Z axis is
simply yellow dots.

The second type of scatter plot is when you have two inputs and the output is displayed in color. In this example, I have
the horizontal axis is RPM, the vertical axis is TPS and MAP is displayed in color. Deep blue is about 15 KPA and red is
80 KPA. Notice that there is a fairly clear pattern of color thru the plot.

All of the graphing shown has been done with MegaLogViewer HD.
See http://www.efianalytics.com/MegaLogViewerHD/