All Kinds of Limits

[Lidio Iacobelli]

Pug,

I've gone on to drive my 2.7L truck nearly everyday since my last post way earlier this year on this topic, (over 13,000 miles), lots of City, some highway, and tons of towing with about a 6000-lbs trailer weight... and never figured out or fixed the massive "off-idle" Tip-in spark reduction that these have stock.

I've extensively raised and played with MBT and borderline spark tables, and even extensively adjusted the tables and settings labeled as "tip-in" spark and etc. The tip in retard I'm referring too and experiencing is right off idle in neutral or "D", and only happens with a very sharp pedal snap off-idle, its not there once your already under load, or if you simply don't snap the pedal down,, even just pressing quickly (not snapping it) the pedal wont show it, or less of it.
I've not experimented with enabling other Mapped points as I didn't want to risk upsetting the way this truck drives over all. Just uncharted territory for me i guess.
I really cant complain with it over all though, my tune on these makes about 17-18psi boost and has Zero issues under any driving conditions I've subjected it too. I've extensively modified the shift schedule so it feels much lighter on its feet under light to medium loads while accelerating and to getting up to speed. Works great on 87 or 93 octane as I just let the Knock stuff handle it accordingly.

I gave up on the big off idle tip-in spark retard as I've decided that HP simply hasn't found it for us. And also the lack of full boost and power only in pretty much 1st gear,, again; I'm convinced its not opened up with the HP stuff.

I've opened and looked at the 2.7L stuff in SCT and they have a lot more unlocked or opened up so-to-speak,, some of it may be useless or not even enabled on this truck, but I'm convinced that lots of it is, and may fix what we're after. There is one specific setting in SCT that I've mentioned here a few months ago that is a power limiter that has a setting of "13mph". I believe this is the one that is holding us back in the 2.7L ecoboost trucks while in first gear from a dead stop. I've played with many other things in HP and its just not there.
As you experienced: my truck is the same way -- if you get it rolling and then nail it just past about 11-15mph,,, it has full power in 1st gear,, it very noticeable seat of the pants and can 100% be seen in the data logging too.

I've also asked HP to enable us the minimum over all commanded spark too. They have it in the 2015+ 5.0L tuning, but not in much else has this setting opened up, including the 2.7L trucks. This setting can help a ton once you get used to it and what you can get a way with providing that it doesn't "cap" trans TQ reduction from happening, some idle stuff, and Cat-warm up too. I usually set this one to anywhere from 0 to not much under -3 and found that this fixes a lot of tip-in and other timing issues, (primarily tip-in stuff) when you cant find it anywhere else. My truck goes -15* to -17* when this occurs off idle, most drivers and consumers don't notice it or don't care.


Thanks

[Puggyberra]

Pug,
I've not experimented with enabling other Mapped points as I didn't want to risk upsetting the way this truck drives over all. Just uncharted territory for me i guess.

After some pm's and looking back over this I was mistaken and Lidio did not ever enable the OP table. I did try enabling it at one point and it caused issues with drivability, particulary spark retard on accerlation after cruising a set speed for a while (think cruise on then trying to pass someone) and I wound up disabling it again.

1 more issue that was brought up in this thread and I don't know if it was ever explained is the overboost DTC that people have gotten, which seem more commong on the 2.7L. The tune I'm running will run ~21.5 psi of boost until the turbo's can't keep up and the boost tapers down (wdc 0, no limits active), however that much boost would cause boost spikes during shifts that would trip the overboost DTC. The responses I saw all pertained to 'tuning your boost/waste gate', which if you're getting an overboost dtc in the middle of a gear or when the turbo spools would make sense. My solution that has worked so far is to set the turbo outlet pressure to 29.5 psi or less. Finding info for the 2.7's is harder and I haven't found confirmation the 2.7's have 3 bar sensors, assuming they do the overboost DTC can be tripped by boost spiking slightly over 30 psi at the TIP sensor during shifts. Setting the 29.5 psi outlet pressure lets the truck use the BOV to keep the boost from spiking too high during the shift.

I'm not proffessing these settings are 'safe' as I have not seen a 2.7 blow up and so can't speak to what they are capable of, and these are solutions I have found from doing hours of reading online and experimenting. If anyone else has input on any of this please feel free to share

[reubone]

What am i missing for desired load? its dropping as rpms climb
2015ecoboost.hpl
2015 ecoboost f150ETP1.hpt

[Puggyberra]

What am i missing for desired load? its dropping as rpms climb
2015ecoboost.hpl
2015 ecoboost f150ETP1.hpt

I'll try to take a look tomorrow when I have a computer and a few mins

[Puggyberra]

You're requested air load is being limited by insufficient fuel flow as seen in driver demand limit source (which is to say the computer's math says it can't flow enough fuel for the air load you want, so it drops it to an air load it thinks it can fuel correctly). The first thing I'll throw out there is I will run up to 2.36 air load @ .82 lamba without fuel limits or losing rail pressure, so for you it is just settings.

A couple things you want to look at changing:

-Fuel Rail pressure (will help some): you've set the cold/normal/ffv tables to request higher fuel rail pressure, but you haven't changed the max table to allow a higher value.
You can see where I've adjusted the value, and also redefined the table values so that most of the restrictions Ford originally had in place remain.
Fuel Rail Pressure Max.jpg

-Enrichment Rate: You probably want to set your enrichment rates up, and you may want to run a little richer due to the spark multipliers that are based off your lambda, though that will exacerbate the limit you're seeing now until you change injector timing; pic shows where mine are at currently. The pedal position I changed because I had a log at ~40-50% throttle where I was hitting over 1.8 air load, bringing power enrichment in earlier made me feel better but that has nothing to do with your limit.
enrichment rate.jpg

-Injector timing/window: This is what will get you around that limit. Currently the ecu doesn't have enough degrees available to it for fuel injection, which is also why you see the load dropping more the higher the rpms go. These are my current changes that I have iterated a few times to arrive at. Also from my understanding the 'duty cycle' is just a value the ecu uses to calculate the amount of fuel it could put in during its maximum injection window, so setting it to 1.1 or higher lets the computer do calculations for fuel values that it won't have enough injection window to actually hit. I've never seen this result in a lean condition, but I personally felt setting the duty cycle higher than 1.1 was something I wanted to try and avoid.
The first 2 are relativley safe to mess around with as the ecu will protect itself if you screw them up badly. However these settings have the potential to let the ecu command fuel injection during a spark event. Please use these as a guideline of what worked on 1 2.7L F-150, not as 'safe guaranteed' values. Also some of the injection angels are before top dead center, some are degrees through the entire 4 stroke cycle, and some seem to be degrees after top dead center of the combustion cycle.
Injector Timing.jpg

One last thing I want to just throw out there are the tempature protections under fuel. I did not want to completley disable them due to them also having the effect of cooling the turbo's as well as the cats (which I don't care about nearly as much). These are what my values look like that avoids exhaust temp limit protection without modifying the actual exhaust temperature table that the ecu references.
temperature control.jpg

[reubone]

Thank you for all that good sir! i had a feeling it was that but didnt know for sure. thanx again

[reubone]

Ok made the changes for the fuel flow and lowered the pedal requirement for wot fuel and wot cam. customer says its back at stock power levels. going to undo everything and see if it goes back up

[Puggyberra]

Ok made the changes for the fuel flow and lowered the pedal requirement for wot fuel and wot cam. customer says its back at stock power levels. going to undo everything and see if it goes back up

They didn't run a log by chance did they? (Would probably make it too easy) I wonder if they accidentally flashed the stock tune back in instead of the updated one. None of those changes should drop it back to 'stock' power levels unless they went the wrong way and restricted fuel flow more than it had been.

[reubone]

May have been the wrong pedal data but i also forgot to enable the wot cam position. Question about the beta. old style vs new style overboost monitor? what is that?

[reubone]

This is the last log i took along with the last tune loaded. says engine light is coming on again which i assume is an over boost since there is o log of it. also this is the next tune i am going to try. Id really like to limit the boost spikes as well. Is the Desired Load capped at 2.2 until i raise my tq model? Thanx
17-12-08 16-38-14.hpl
2015 ecoboost f150ETP1.hpt
2015 ecoboost f150ETP2 beta.hpt

[Puggyberra]

This is the last log i took along with the last tune loaded. says engine light is coming on again which i assume is an over boost since there is o log of it. also this is the next tune i am going to try. Id really like to limit the boost spikes as well. Is the Desired Load capped at 2.2 until i raise my tq model? Thanx
17-12-08 16-38-14.hpl
2015 ecoboost f150ETP1.hpt
2015 ecoboost f150ETP2 beta.hpt

Hey reubone, I went back through my logs and tune revisions and uploaded several more to that link I gave you. Look at v48, v49, and v51/v54. Those are the ones where I got the dtc under control. The pid to watch is the TIP actual, if it goes over 44 psi/90 inHg my light would trip. I tried chaging all the overboost monitor settings and it had no affect, presumably because I was exceeding the 3 bar sensor not generating too much more boost than the truck wanted. Setting the turbo outlet pressure to 29.5 prevented me from having that light trip so far... though I will still hit 89.7 inHg out of the 90 the sensor can read, so I'm right at the edge there. As far as logging I've done setting the outlet pressure that high doesn't seem to reduce boost in the gear, just during shifts, so setting it more conservativley shouldn't affect boost/air load. If thats not whats causing the engine light you'll have to have him get it read to see what code is being thrown. I saw the new style/old style, I'm not sure what they do either, I left them alone heh.

The log you shared is tracking too many pids, the WDC in it is pretty much worthless lol. The pressure spike you'll see during a gear shift also would be too brief to show up on that log. That is one of my biggest annoyances with the ecoboosts is the number of parameters you want to track is 2-3x what you actually can, so you have to do the same 'test' with multiple logging profiles to get good data. He's also hitting traction control pretty frequently, from logs where I've done that the turbo has trouble 'catching up' after traction control in 1st and 2nd so air loads on that pull will be lower than without hitting the traction control.

I also threw up a log of v23, which was taken at the end of August in ~85 degree wether. When I was hitting about the loads you're hitting the highest charge temp I saw after a 1-2 pull was 138 degrees. That's why I have such a large drop in max load allowed on my LSPI tables from 150-180 MCT. It looks like the guy you're tuning for is probably somewhere north of georgia, so he probably won't see those temps until next summer.

I tried enabling the optimum power mapped point and the truck ran like garbage, so I disabled it again and just changed the pedal position and load % the VCT changes to the optimum power profile.

Looking through your tune the only load limit I have higher than you in torque management is the exhaust temp protect, which is also my best guess for what is causing the combustion stability limit. I had tried originally set it to 4.0, and wanted to reel in some of the excessive values I had so I tried setting it to 2.5, then 3.0, and both caused limiting. Setting it to 4.0 again removed the limit.

Lastly yes, to have the truck request more than 2.2 air load you will have to raise the definitions in the tq tables for all the mapped points. I created 2 spreadsheets to make guestimates to fill in those values which I also put in that link so you can see where I got my numbers. Sorry for the wall of text.

[reubone]

No issue it's good reading. Yeah the pid list is too long to populate wastegate for sure but at least I can track my boost spikes. The outlet pressure is set to 29.0psi but im still getting them so at least for me it isnt working. What triggers the oscillation is the throttle following the Driver Demand table. Which id like for it to continue to follow as i find it helps keep the throttle open during wot, except of course during boost spikes. Also the combustion stability limit i don't think is a limit as i'm still getting the 18-20 psi i was after with it active. A previous Eco boost (when this was not active) was much harder to tune. Could be my memory but as long as combustion stability is on, it follows driver demand. If i could still get good turbo response with smaller boost spikes id be in happy land. The desired load increase is not my goal i was just curious, thank you. Also i notice my timing is really low and im still getting knock. Sometimes it audible so i get the feeling its not ghost knock. Maybe run better fuel?

[Puggyberra]

I tried playing around with the spark tables as well as the knock retard limits/advances and never got timing to advance. The per cyl retard was the same in every cylinder (starting at about -1.8 and going up to -3.2 depending on table values/weather). I feel like I'm missing something with spark because when I eased into the throttle going to WOT the per cyl would show different values per cylinder until the computer kicked everything into WOT/Power Enrich/Optimum Power. Once those start getting referenced the per cyl seems to just be a global and I haven't yet found a way to influence it. That said I was running between 5-8 degrees of timing on 93 octane with OAL at -.93 -> -1.0.

Turbo tuning I haven't finished fleshing out either, I got frustrated enough going through over 40 revisions of the tune to finally get the overboost DTC figured out that I wanted to work on something else, and decided on spark since I thought my fuel looked ok. That is next on my hit list though, I'm thinking I'm going to have to redefine that table as well due to the tables only going up to between 25-40 lb/min and my airflows going significantly higher. I had tried changing surge line values to try and change BOV behavior and even with large number changes did not see changes I was looking for.

The Comb. Stab. Limit I did have to get around, though I don't remember if it was a big issue before or only after I defined my torque tables higher than 2.2 air load. I can say on the tune you just posted you're making 17 psi of boost at 4600 RPM's and 2.02 air load while in that limit. Mine is at 2.2 air load and 20 psi of boost at the same RPM (yours is requesting 2.2, mine is requesting 2.29 air load at those same points though). Neither truck is hitting the requested air load, I've assumed its due to turbo tuning, though it could be something else. The one concern with the tune setup I have now is the only thing limiting the truck from going for 2.5 air load is a torque limit in the trans, which means theoretically boost numbers could get stupid if the truck doesn't think its making enough torque.

And the quest continues...

[reubone]

Mine is being limited or attempted to be controlled by the driver demand table as mine is set pretty low. Once the boost spikes on gear change it bounces around alot before settling in. Same happens when traction control kicks in. if i could control the boost spiking the tune would be a lot smoother. You can see the tq spike along with it. Driver demand is only requesting like 380ftlbs.

[Auto-Hentzschel]

I believe, there are some hidden limiters that destroy us the tunes. its possible to rice a little bit the boost, but if I go to 2 bar and more, the engine goes in the limp mode. Now I work on a Mustang with VARGAS stage2 Turbocharger. But what ever I do to rise the boost it will not work. 1.7 / 1.8 bar, no problem It hold it to the redline. But the capacity it 2 bar and more till the redline and 500 HP. But with the actual Editor software isn't possible.
Eric Brooks promised me to find the bad limiters what annoys me ;-) hopefully
At least, here in Germany is Winter and customer need his car back not before next year.

[Puggyberra]

I believe, there are some hidden limiters that destroy us the tunes. its possible to rice a little bit the boost, but if I go to 2 bar and more, the engine goes in the limp mode. Now I work on a Mustang with VARGAS stage2 Turbocharger. But what ever I do to rise the boost it will not work. 1.7 / 1.8 bar, no problem It hold it to the redline. But the capacity it 2 bar and more till the redline and 500 HP. But with the actual Editor software isn't possible.
Eric Brooks promised me to find the bad limiters what annoys me ;-) hopefully
At least, here in Germany is Winter and customer need his car back not before next year.

It sounds like you're exceeding the max pressure of the map/tip sensor. Anytime I have a boost spike exceed 3 bar absolute (2 bar gauge) I get an overboost dtc and the truck goes in limp mode. The only other two boost limiters should be outlet pressure max and max pr.

[reubone]

Can we scale in bigger sensors like a 4 bar? Also has anyone tried ethanol?

[reubone]

Also im getting the overboost:yes deal flash up when i get boost spikes over 2.7 bar. Also the tip requested is over 2.7 bar as well so I wonder which is causing it

[Puggyberra]

Also im getting the overboost:yes deal flash up when i get boost spikes over 2.7 bar. Also the tip requested is over 2.7 bar as well so I wonder which is causing it

I don't trigger the DTC until 3 bar. Metroplex's guide for the sho goes over changing the values for replacing his stock 2.5 bar to a 3 bar. I know there is a 4 bar available for the Focus St, I haven't bothered to check if it's compatible with other engines or vehicles.

I haven't gotten any tuning done in the last few days due to the truck's built in power inverter not wanting to power my thinkpad x300... I get 3-4 hours of battery, but don't like flashing with less than an hour left available heh.

I think the overboost can still be tuned out, I just haven't found the way to do it yet. I tried messing with the wastegate ff table and didn't really get much accomplished. I tried changing the I gain on the wg control in the last cell and that seemed to help 4.5k rpm and up some. I don't like relying on I gains to get a system where I want it though, so it was more of a test than a method.

I'm about at the point of changing the base table and trying to define it for pressures other than 0 so that it has better control under different airflow conditions. Both thof 3.5 and 2.0 ecoboosts have that table fully fleshed out, but theirs is also setup off boost pressure not vacuum like ours.

A while ago I changed surge line both directions trying to control shift boost spikes, iirc lowering them made the BOV less responsive, raising them didn't make it more responsive though.

[sc544x4f150]

Maybe this is related but I finally got around my injector limiter thanks to guys here telling me to lower my EOI clip. No I'm finding a new limit. My airload follows my LSPI table until about 4000RPM then it just starts trailing off. No change in my sources at this point. Driver Demand Limit= Combustion stability, Torque Airlimit Source= 5 popcorn, Torque Max source= Popcorn. It was suggested that I raise my LSPI tables more but I would like to avoid that due to the varying quality gas I get driving this thing all over the area for work. I want to hit the load limits in the LSPI tables and take advantage of the OAR to adjust. I attached the tune and a log. Sorry the log isn't that clean as the weather here was not ideal.

87_water-meth_124_2.hpl 87_water-meth_124.hpt