David Emanuel Sander

The rotational dynamics and lubrication of the piston pin of a Gasoline engine are investigated in this work. The clearance plays an essential role for the lubrication and dynamics of the piston pin. To obtain a realistic clearance, as a first step, a thermoelastic simulation is conducted for the aluminum piston for the full-load firing operation by considering the heat flow from combustion into the piston top and suitable thermal boundary conditions for the piston rings, piston skirt, and piston void. The result from this thermoelastic simulation is a noncircular and strongly enlarged clearance. In the second step, the calculated temperature field of the piston and the piston-pin clearance are used in the simulation of the piston-pin journal bearings. For this journal bearing simulation, a highly advanced and extensively validated method is used that also realistically describes mixed lubrication. By using this approach, the piston-pin rotation and lubrication are investigated for several different operating conditions from part load to full load for different engine speeds. It is found that the piston pin rotates mostly at very slow rotational speeds and even changes its rotational direction between different operating conditions. Several influencing effects on this dynamic behaviour (e.g., clearance and pin surface roughness) are investigated to see how the lubrication of this crucial part can be improved.

This paper presents results of experimental investigations on the friction losses of the crankshaft radial lip seals of a modern four-cylinder diesel engine for passenger car applications. A two stage strip-test has been conducted on a motored engine test bed to obtain the friction torque of the radial lip seals. For the experimental investigations with the crankshaft seals removed from the engine, a special sealing apparatus has been designed and built. A wide range of tests have been performed covering the full speed range of the engine at lubricant temperatures of 70 ℃, 90 ℃, and 110 ℃. The results show a dependency on crankshaft speed and engine media supply temperature but also revealed the presence of constant plateaus of friction torque over engine speed.

The Hybrid Finite Element Analysis (HFEA) method is based on combining conventional Finite Element Analysis (FEA) with analytical solutions and energy methods for mid-frequency computations. The method is appropriate for computing the vibration of structures which are comprised by stiff load bearing components and flexible panels attached to them; and for considering structure-borne loadings with the excitations applied on the load bearing members. In such situations, the difficulty in using conventional FEA at higher frequencies originates from requiring a very large number of elements in order to capture the flexible wavelength of the panel members which are present in a structure. In the HFEA the conventional FEA model is modified by de-activating the bending behavior of the flexible panels in the FEA computations and introducing instead a large number of dynamic impedance elements for representing the omitted bending behavior of the panels. The excitation is considered to be applied on the conventional FEA model and the vibration analysis is conducted using the FEA. The power flow through the dynamic impedance elements is computed, and in this work it is used to assess the vibration of the flexible panels. Successful comparisons between test data and HFEA results have been presented in the past for car body structures and for a rotorcraft application. In this paper a three-way comparison is presented for the vibration of a production vehicle body in the frequency range 200Hz - 1,000Hz. Six different excitation locations on the stiff parts of the structure are utilized (one at a time); for each excitation the mobility of five reference body points on the load bearing members, and the mobility of seven flexible vehicle panels is measured and the measurements are compared with both conventional FEA results and with HFEA computations. The conventional FEA model which is used in this work for the respective computations is a production FEA vehicle model with sufficient refinement in order to be valid up to 1,000Hz based on a requirement of exhibiting at least six elements per wavelength at the highest frequency of interest. The FEA model had been validated in the past through comparison with modal test data in low frequencies. Discussion about the development of the HFEA model and the correlation of both numerical solutions to the test data are presented in this paper.