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This paper describes how a complete test bench for a Common Rail™ injection system has been built by means of hardware/software codesign techniques. The test bench is made up of two main components: a HW component running mainly on a FPGA device, interacting directly with the electromechanical components (namely, a high pressure pump, six electrical injectors, an electrical discharge valve, two pressure sensors), for high speed signal acquisition and generation, and for closed loop control; and a SW component, written in Visual Basic™, running on a PC, including a graphical user interface for parameters setting and system characterization. An additional signal acquisition board is also used for monitoring six load cells and for temperature control. The two components communicate through the standard PC's parallel port operated in Enhanced Parallel Port mode. The test bench is totally designed, simulated and implemented under the CodeSimulink hardware/software codesign environment, which runs as a plug-in of The Mathworks™ Simulink™ design tool. A few other commercial HW/SW codesign tools have also been considered, but none of them offered either enough performance or flexibility or, more importantly, ease of use and compatibility with existing Simulink simulation models of the various components of the test bench.

In order to take into account the interaction between mechanical parts and the mechanical system when optimizing complex mechanical products, a cosimulation based collaborative optimization method is presented, the presented method can achieve the topology optimization of mechanical parts and the mechanical system optimization simultaneously. A software framework is given as well, and the effectiveness is verified by an elaborated crank-connecting rod mechanism with a flexible connecting rod.