COMPUTATIONAL MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF FACE PROFILE OF PISTON RING

Abstract

The engine is one of the most widely used machines in today‘s era, which consists of a number of components, many of which can be accounted as tribological pairs such as bearings, transmissions, gears, pistons, clutches, wiper blades, tires, and electrical contacts that accounts to frictional power losses. A substantial portion of these frictional losses (20-40% approximately) is attributed to the piston-ring liner assembly. The tribological and computational study can reduce frictional losses to some extent which provide saving in fuel consumption and increase the engine life.

In this project, one dimensional analysis for the lubrication of the piston ring and cylinder liner has been developed. The piston ring has been treated as a reciprocating, dynamically-loaded bearing with a combined squeeze and sliding motion. Again combined elliptical-parabolic profile has been developed of the piston ring and modeled for face profile of piston ring. Equations have been developed for the face profile through MATLAB coding. The profile of the piston ring along width was more prominent for forming fluid film thickness.

A numerical procedure was developed to obtain the cyclic variations of fluid film thickness with the crank angle. Also, it was further utilized to determine the hydro-dynamic fluid film pressure over the span of the piston ring.