REDUCED ENGINE FRICTION AND WEAR
This Final Technical Report discusses the progress was made on the experimental and numerical tasks over the duration of this project regarding a new technique for decreasing engine friction and wear via liner rotation. The experimental subtasks involved quantifying the reduction in engine friction for a prototype rotating liner engine relative to a comparable baseline engine. Both engine were single cylinder conversions of nominally identical production four-cylinder engines. Hot motoring tests were conducted initially and revealed that liner rotation decreased engine friction by 20% under motoring conditions. A well-established model was used to estimate that liner rotation should decrease the friction of a four-cylinder engine by 40% under hot motoring conditions. Hot motoring tear-down tests revealed that the crankshaft and valve train frictional losses were essentially the same for the two engines, as expected. However, the rotating liner engine had much lower (>70%) piston assembly friction compared to the conventional engine. Finally, we used the Instantaneous IMEP method to compare the crank-angle resolved piston assembly friction for the two engines. Under hot motoring conditions, these measurements revealed a significant reduction in piston assembly friction, especially in the vicinity of compression TDC when the lubrication regime transitions from hydrodynamic through mixed and into boundary friction. We have some remaining problems with these measurements that we expect to solve during the next few weeks. We will then perform these measurements under firing conditions. We also proposed to improve the state-of-the-art of numerical modeling of piston assembly friction for conventional engines and then to extend this model to rotating liner engines. Our research team first modeled a single ring in the Purdue ring-liner test rig. Our model showed good agreement with the test rig data for a range of speeds and loads. We then modeled a complete piston assembly in an engine. The model appears to produce the correct behavior, but we cannot quantify its strengths or weaknesses until our crank-angle-resolved measurements have been completed. Finally, we proposed and implemented a model for the effects of liner rotation on piston assembly friction. Here, we propose that the rotating liner design is analogous to the shaft-bushing mechanism. Therefore, we used the side-slip rolling friction model to simulate the effects of liner rotation. This model appears to be promising, but final analysis of its strengths and/or weaknesses must await our crank-angle-resolved measurements.
- Research Organization:
- University of Texas
- DOE Contract Number:
- FC26-01NT41337
- OSTI ID:
- 843071
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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