Influence of piston surface treatment on piston assembly friction in an eco-mileage vehicle engine

This study investigated the effect on piston assembly friction after treating piston surfaces with a fine particle bombarding process, using a friction measurement apparatus with a floating cylinder liner, similar to an eco-mileage vehicle engine. Friction was measured in four conditions: (1) no treatment (standard piston in a commercially-available engine), (2) micro dimple treatment (45 μm ceramic particles were air-blasted onto the piston surface), (3) molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) shot treatment (1 μm MoS2 particles were air-blasted onto the piston surface), and (4) combination of the previous two micro dimple and MoS2 shot treatments (first 45 μm ceramic particles and then 1 μm MoS2 were air-blasted onto the piston surface). Results indicated that friction decreased in the following order: no treatment > micro dimple treatment > MoS2 shot treatment > combination of micro dimple and MoS2 shot treatments.

A Critical Review of Approaches to the Design of Floating-Liner Apparatus for Instantaneous Piston Assembly Friction Measurement

Several approaches have been developed to measure instantaneous friction between the piston assembly and cylinder in internal combustion (IC) engines, such as floating-liner, reciprocating liner, instantaneous mean effective pressure (IMEP), fixed sleeve, and (P-ω) method and tribological bench tests. However, the “floating-liner method” and the “(IMEP) method” are the most common methods used to measure instantaneous friction between the piston assembly and IC engines. This paper critically evaluates different approaches to the design of the “floating-liner”. The paper begins by discussing piston assembly frictional losses and their significance and then discuss the development of instantaneous piston-friction measurements. After that, it reviews the main design challenges in the floating-liner approach. “Methods of cylinder sealing” and “force balancing methods” are also reviewed. Design challenges associated with firing operation were presented. Floating-liner designs were classified into different categories with a detailed presentation of the features of each. The paper ends by presenting a range of broad recommendations for further work which would benefit future designs.