Instantaneous fuel consumption estimation using smartphones

This paper investigates how to estimate instantaneous fuel consumption using smartphones and OBD-II (On-board Diagnostics) adapters. Although most of the new cars have instant miles per gallon readout feature, the readings from those dashboard displays are usually proprietary and are difficult to record. Not to mention older cars do not have this feature. In this paper, we describe a system and associated algorithms to monitor fuel consumption of gasoline-powered vehicles in real time at second-level granularity. Specifically, we propose two algorithms: 1) Powertrain-based Model, which is derived from estimating an engineâ™s fuel injection rate, and 2) Vehicle Dynamics-based Model, which considers fuel consumption in terms of the mechanical work applied to a vehicle. They are designed for vehicles with and without OBD-II adaptors respectively. The proposed system is compatible with most of the passenger vehicles and can be easily deployed. We evaluate our system in a field test and show that it can successfully estimate instantaneous fuel consumption, the average difference between estimation results and the ground truth is about 6%.