The Study of Friction between Piston Ring and Different Cylinder Liners using Floating Liner Engine - Part 1

The objective of this work was to develop an experimental system to support development and validation of a model for the lubrication of two-piece Twin-Land-Oil-Control-Rings (hereafter mentioned as TLOCR). To do so, a floating liner engine was modified by opening the head and crankcase. Additionally, only TLOCR was installed together with a piston that has 100 micron cold clearance to minimize the contribution of the skirt to total friction. Friction traces, FMEP trend, and repeatability have been examined to guarantee the reliability of the experiment results. Then, engine speed, liner temperature, ring tension, and land widths were changed in a wide range to ensure all three lubrication regimes were covered in the experiments. It was found that for each different ring land design, the measured instantaneous friction coefficient under different engine speed, liner temperature, and ring tension can roughly collapse to the same Stribeck curve, which indicates that the modified system and measurement protocol developed in this work can provide simple boundary conditions and sensible results such that a fair comparison can be made between experiment and theory.